Well the guy who made the comment about Gnome 3 being "(G-Unit)-y" was absolutely spot on.  So I nuked the install again and re-installed 11.10 and am currently upgrading the Wife's laptop so we are on the same system.  She loves Unity so I'll try and get used to it so I can answer questions for her if she has them. She is a whole hell of a lot smarter than she likes to lead people on about in regards to Ubuntu Linux, so she shouldn't be too worried about 11.10.