Thanks guys.  It is as I thought.  Fortunately the 5gb /dev/sda4 only
contains the Linux From Scratch stuff I played with last year and never
finished.  I do have good notes so can safely dump it.

Actually, I was thinking to do a backup of what little I need to save and go
back to just having the xp partition and then doing a clean load of ubuntu
7.10 before restoring.  Big thing for me was to understand what was going on
here though.  thanks again!

BTW, don't you guys sleep either?