debian lenny install broken because of grub2, difficult to work around

[swivel at shells.gnugeneration.com]

Seeing behavior similar to what is documented here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=586621

Fix is reportedly in 1.98+20100705, which cannot be installed on lenny
due to unsatisfied dependencies.

Attempting to install legacy grub to work around the broken grub2 fails
because the grub package depends on grub-common, the only grub-common
package available seems to be the GRUB2 version...

Been a long time since a debian install left me with a non-bootable
machine, I sure hope GRUB2 brought some functionality worth this embarassing
regression.