There are so many of these little tricks it is hard to keep them all in the front of your mind when something goes wrong.
I've always had a much easier time dealing with problems on other people's Macs than dealing with the same problems on my own; I get flustered when it's my own machine.
And add to that the fact that problems like yours don't come up all that often any more, so I've now got to dig for solutions that were on the tip of my tongue not that many years ago; and as it worked out, you came up with an easy solution that I had forgotten about.
I'm curious, though, if Repair Disk would have worked.
