Hi Dave and everyone...
Well, it was a no go last night. The trick of the keypress
did prevent the computer from sleeping (Shift didn't seem to work, but the space bar did). But Restore still stopped at just under 50% progress. I let it go for a while even after it was obvious it had stopped, but after it didn't move for 1.5 hours, I gave up. At that point, there was a lot of CD-drive activity, but little else.
I guess my next best bet is to do a clean install of 10.3.4? I'm curious though - in this post
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=542, which seems a similar problem to mine, OneMatchFire says he finally was able to Restore when he "ran Disk Util from a newly installed version of 10.3" instead of the CD. Can you restore onto the hard drive on which disk utility is installed? It doesn't seem like you could, or maybe I'm misreading.
At this point, that would ideal. Otherwise, I'm looking at a lot of time upgrading and reinstalling programs. Though I will get a squeaky clean OS.
Either way - I still haven't lost any of my info (knock on wood). I still thank god I got Super Duper!
(Thanks, once again, for all the help so far and still to come).