VERY strange behavior-- desktop and dock are not working

Hi all,
My friends' macbook is really messed up and she doesn't have applecare. She is running 10.4.11 and suddenly her desktop stopped responding, and her dock disappeared. Specifically, her desktop is plain blue, and her folder icons are there but they can't be clicked on at all. The dock is missing but the menu on the top is fine. She can open up the finder and navigate to everything via the "go" menu and open everything-- all apps work etc.
I tried going into the dock part of system preferences, and then system prefs crashes. I tried opening the activity monitor and quitting the "finder" process and that didn't help. The dock process doesn't show up at all.
I also tried resetting the PRAM, repairing disk permissions, and booting in single-user mode and running fsck -y. Fsck -y gets stuck on "repairing B-Tree" and then says it can't repair the hard drive.
So I put in her install DVD and tried to run disk utility from there. "Checking B-Tree" showed up in green for a while, and then I got a red error message that the HD could not be repaired.
Now it doesn't boot at all (grey screen, and then it shuts down-- even in safe mode) AND when I try to run the install DVD, the HD doesn't show up as a destination folder. Yikes!
Any advice on what I can try next so she doesn't have to take her computer into apple? She has everything backed up, at least!

Hmmmm, if the drive isn't showing up it may be dead or dying, but Unfortunately, Disk Utility can't fix all that much, Your best bet is DiskWarrior, you need the CD though.
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
But others that may work…
Drive Genius 2…
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/drive_genius.php
TechTool Pro 4…
http://www.micromat.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=83
Data Rescue II...
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
This one would require another HD with plenty of space to recover to.
Also, does that MacBook have Firewire?

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