Well no applications in HAM is normalish behaviour in that situation, it was more than likely trying to repair itself which can take a while.

Are people happy with this option checked at default?
You see it seems to be a common question that flopswap was not working due to this not being enabled as default.
I do feel it's better being checked as default, if there are no extermal partitions available, the upstart script will fail and fallback to device swap only.
The only reason you had an issue was because the external partitions were available but corrupt, flopswap can't know that.

That all seems fine, it seems you have "External swap option disabled at the moment but when you have your card sorted again. Check the "Use External swap on boot" button and all will be fine.

I wouldn't necessarily agree.
Swaps that are excessively larger than RAM are pointless.
Yes, it will take longer before swap fragmentation occurs but the swap space is never going to be used correctly.
The aim of memory is to try and keep as much of it as possible in RAM, so we can do tasks quickly without having to resort to using swap. Obviously there is not enough RAM in our N900's to cope with our multitasking needs.
I would say 800Mb is the correct balance of having enough swap for the device to use and keeping as much space available for storage.
I wouldn't recommend anything lower than the stock swap size of 768Mb or anything higher than 1536Mb (double stock). There is no point if you are going to refresh the swap every night. I can last two days before I need to refresh (on 800Mb); with pretty heavy phone, browser and mediaplayer usage. Also a correctly balanced swapiness has a part to play in this.