As long as she's willing to do the work I don't mind a woman being on top.

Back to the subject at hand however... I've had things come in black before. It was usually because the ambient setting was 3 or some such low number, not because the maps or color were actually gone. I can often ungroup then crank the values up to 90 to fix it. Just be sure to do it out of the way of other objects in the scene. It's easier to grab everything and regroup it afterwords.