I honestly don't ever remember seeing the choice offered to install GRUB
- that is what puzzles me. I am not giving up, I am going to remove all
of my NTFS devices and do a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.04. Then as you
say, I will reintroduce the NTFS drives to a working Ubuntu system
(hopefully without GRUB)!

I have another machine in which I have an NTFS drive that is on a SATA
connector and not resident in a removable tray. I almost had heart
failure when Ubuntu installed just fine and saw my NTFS partitions.
When I rebooted into Ubuntu, Grub came up and said it could not find a
valid partition. I pulled Ubuntu out and had to run a restore console
for Windows XP and invoke the FIXMBR command to restore my XP boot
partition.

My advice to anyone is to be very careful about the initial installation
of Ubuntu if you have Windows XP on a separate drive. I would recommend
disabling NTFS devices on the initial installation pass.