Leopard froze then booted into Setup Assistant (MacBook)

A friend of mine was cruising along the Internet when Firefox froze (not uncommon under Leopard). Soon thereafter, her dock froze in place, followed by the rest of Leopard's UI. No kernel panic, but she had no choice but to hard reset (hold power for 3 seconds).
When she powered up, she got the normal login screen. After logging in, she got the Setup Assistant (you know, the "Congratulations on buying a Mac. What's your name?" wizard), with a blank desktop and no dock. The assistant is unresponsive--none of the buttons work. She can't even shut down from the Apple menu. It just hangs after clicking shut down (if the menu even opens in the first place).
I was fortunate enough to be able to boot the MacBook into target disk mode and I'm currently backing up the whole drive using SuperDuper(!).
I plan to do an Apple Hardware Test after the backup completes, and if it passes, I'll downgrade to Tiger with an archive and install. I'm very reluctant to reinstall Leopard because of Firefox crashes, Time Machine malfunctions, and other commonly occurring Leopard problems.
Have any of you experienced this problem? Any ideas what happened? What do you think of my downgrade plan? Any advice or warnings?

UPDATE:
I successfully completed the SuperDuper backup, and booted into the Setup Assistant again. This time I got a couple steps in before it stopped responding. When I tried to retrieve files and settings from a volume on the computer, the assistant indicated there was no OS X system on the computer (very odd...).
Restarted, tried to do an Apple Hardware Test (holding H at startup), which didn't do anything. It just booted into Setup Assistant again.
Last chance: I booted into safe mode by holding down shift. After quite a while, the MacBook started up, and after login it loaded the desktop and everything else correctly. Seeing this, I rebooted normally. Everything loaded fine, like the whole Setup Assistant problem never happened.
So in the wake of this potential catastrophe, I'm creating a new SuperDuper backup, and on a separate partition, a Time Machine backup. I hate to say it, but I don't really trust Leopard.

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Message was edited by: fisheral

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Message was edited by: Bonnie Ward

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Tried that and it just doesn't read the disk. I've booted it with the disc already in and held Shift and also tried it with "C". The same for putting the disc in just as it boots up.
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Leopard froze then booted into Setup Assistant (MacBook)

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