Troy Dawson said...

|It sounds like, for some reason, grub is actually pointing to a 
|different grub.conf file.  I get this reaction when I have more than 1 
|distribution installed on my machine, and I edit the grub.conf by hand 
|to point to a different distribution.

That was it.  Apparently /etc/grub.conf needs to
be a link to /boot/grub/grub.conf, because that's
what really gets used.  /etc/grub.conf had somehow
become an actual file instead of a symlink.

I really, really wish people wouldn't do things
like that...  Oh, well.  Thanks!