I think even if I did have a recent save, I'd rather not have to kill her again! I'm not much good at boss fights.
Anyway, yes, that sounds like a handy solution, I'll give that a try. It'll be nice to be able to proceed. Well, I say "nice", my understanding is that the later stages of the game are quite tricky.
I think what happened with the staff thing is it actually got stuck inside the wall, so I couldn't access it from either inside the room nor from the outside when using the pyramid exploit.
