Impossible but true startup problem/solution

My girlfriend's ibook G3, 700 mh processor, 384 ram, running 10.2.8 starting having problems. The ball would spin forever… one day while in the Mail program the ball spun and spun and she finally held down the power button till the thing shut down. When she tried to turn it back on, it gave the chime, greyscreen with apple and spinning gear… and never went past that mark. If you let it run for an hour or so, it would eventually go to the black Darwin screen and ask for a password. I started it up from the install disk, ran DU, it said all was well. Attempts to reboot resulted in the spinning gear forever and/or Darwin. I ran fsck numerous times; always told me the volume appeared to be OK. I attempted to start up from the install disk again -- wouldn't do it. I ran fsck some more. All OK. I tried starting up in safe mode -- it took a LONG time, but finally did. I backed up all the files onto an external HD. Restart: back to the spinning gear. After numerous repeats of all this, I managed to start up again from the install disk -- so I chose Archive and Install and clicked continue. It ran through it's whole cycle, restarted to the spinning gear. I restarted to the disk, this time it worked for awhile, then said it was examining the target disk and predicted 8 hours, then 10 hours, then 13 hours -- and then all of a sudden it ran through everything and finished and restarted. Got a nice blue screen and request to insert disk 2. Did so and it installed all the rest and then the HD and all the files and apps reappeared magically! Found a previous systems folder too, as predicted. But what I can't understand is this: the system returned to 10.2.1, which was what it was when she bought it. BUT -- all the non-Apple software she had is STILL THERE and STILL RUNS. Microsoft Office, airport (which didn't come on the original disks), some other apps. How is that possible? While Netgear, for example, appears as the airport connection, and works fine -- although the Netgear software is nowhere to be found!
It's been running now for several hours and seems more or less OK. But every so often it is quite SLOW, particularly in the mail program. VERY SLOW.
Strange, huh?

Archive/install option doesn't wipe your disk. All your third party software should still be there. Here is a link to the FAQ "Installation Options and Their Meaning"
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121995

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