Aperture really screwed up!
Wish I'd been paying attention to MacRumors earlier. The Leopard bug has caused many of my photo files to be flagged as offline. That is, my boot hard drive is off line, according to Aperture!
The Apple solution is to the problem is like telling Firestone tire owners to slow down. I wouldn't be so torqued if the Apple reference included an Aperture fix but so far I haven't found any threads on the issue of lost master files.
The geniuses at the Apple store have never heard of the problem.
Happy New Year,
Jon😡