In trying to solve the problem, I discovered Westwind Computing's article on Recovering NetInfo Domains from Backup. This article provides nice instructions for booting into single user mode (using Command-S at startup) and then restoring the NetInfo database from the backup copy. To my amazement, only 70% of the backup file was there. So now I had two copies of the NetInfo database without a good one.
Really not wanting to reinstall since I had Fink installed with a lot of packages, I decided to look at the NetInfo dump from another 10.1-based machine. Wallah! I was able to cut and paste the missing parts of the NetINFO dump file from the non-corrupted one to the corrupted one. Went through the process once more from the above reference and the machine booted without a problem and everything was restored correctly.
From now on I dump out my netinfo database twice a day and one of them is to a different machine.

