So my motherboard burned out. That was a bummer. On the bright side, I had wanted to upgrade my processor for a while so I went to my local computer store and got:

CPU: AMD Phenom 9500 (Quadcore)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5
Mobo Chipset: AMD 790FX
Memory: 2x2GB OCZ DDR2

Armed with this new equipment I decided to give the installation another shot. It didn't crash but I ended up with the same problem (booting from the DVD just showed the "Missing com.apple.Boot.plist" and booting directly from the drive showed just the blinking cursor after "Verifying DMI pool information"). I did some more research and one forum thread recommended that I partition the drive with a MS-DOS style MBR and not GUID (which apparently was the problem) and that seemed to fix the boot problem.

I am typing this response from within Leopard now and I figured I'd point out my error if that would help someone else in the future.