another curious thing I just noticed is this: the list of kernels available at boot time (in the actual grub menu shown at boot) IS NOT THE SAME LIST THAT APPEARS IN GRUB.CONF. in the boot-time menu, the kernel it boots is the most recent one shown, and there are other older ones that do not appear in grub.conf. while in grub.conf there are several newer ones that do not appear on the boot-time grub menu.
Has Grub been installed from another partition, in which it's looking for the grub.conf file?