It looked like the failure was due to the latest Exchange log not existing. Using eseutil it showed that both the private and public databases were in a Dirty Shutdown state.  I figured it would not work, but I first tried a soft recovery.  It failed because the log was missing.

I was not sure which process would be faster among a database repair or a database restore, but we chose the repair first, unfortunately.  After it appeared the database recovery would be about 16-20 of more downtime, we cancelled the repair and began restoring the backup from the previous night.  We had Backup Exec 10d at this client and can happily report that the restore was successful.  A 30GB private store took about 4.5 hours to restore off a USB-based backup.  One issue why it took so long is that this server does not have USB 2.0 ports. 

Big UGH, but we were back up and running the next day.  Another big reason to have something like Backup Exec System Recovery, the restore would have been a lot quicker.

I downloaded Adobe Reader 8.1.3 and it installed without problems.