My thanks to those of you who offered help and assistance, both in public and in private, to my "friend" yesterday.  After lots of right moves down wrong roads, I thought I’d, as Stephen asked me to, share how I got from the DVD to a file that we could use in Windows Movie Maker. 
    Via the comments, I discovered Handbrake, a cool piece of software that did the ripping/encoding work that I needed.  Using Handbrake’s Windows version (which is pretty new, I guess), I was able to get the video and audio off of the DVD and into .mp4 format.  But Windows Movie Maker couldn’t work with that, so I needed to do another conversion.  I immediately thought of Zamzar, but my file was too big (Zamzar has a maximum upload size of 100 MB per file).  So I searched for, found, and installed several promising little programs.
    Since not a single one of them worked properly, or would allow me to do a full conversion without paying a fee, I’m not going to tell you which ones I found.  What I will tell you is that I eventually realized that I could use Handbrake to encode the files into smaller chunks (basically, going chapter by chapter from the DVD), which I could then upload to Zamzar and transfer to .avi. 
    Within twenty minutes of uploading an awful lot of video, I was able to download the converted files, which I then burned to a CD for my student. 
    Whew.   I rather hate video.  But, as more and more folks get into using video online on a regular basis, I have a hunch that there’ll be more universal tools out there so, hopefully, I won’t ever have a funky video experience like this again.
    (Hurry up, video software folks.)