Thanks for all your suggestions and help. I suspect it was the I/O. I did follow the script manually, and everything appears to be clean, it was just writing to the loopback device on the MMC2 card that seems to have caused a problem. Metalayer wouldn't have been it, since I've sorted that out a couple of days back.
Anyhow, I'm doin' it "old-school," since I've now got a partition I have been using for all the different flavors of wms you've been churning out.

In fact, I'm looking for a separate thread to start with the pros and cons of each of the wms you've released, and which ones can play nicely together!

Thanks again, and keep 'em coming. Looking forward to GNOME with compiz fusion!