As far as I know, contacts and most of the stuff won't be lost if you just reflash the Fiasco image. None of your problem should be in the eMMC. However, this makes me think that it may be useful to write a program in Java/Dalvik for use on NITDroid, to allow access to the Maemo filesystem from within NITDroid... Don't know if it already exists, or it the way NITDroid is ported permits for it, but it seems like it should be doable enough.

There's also a 'recovery' kernel available on meego.org, which allows for booting into some sort of shell with access to the file system, I THINK. Don't quote me on that, I don't remember much, since it's only come up once in the threads I was looking at.

In the future, since you're using Multiboot, install BackupMenu. It makes much better backups than the default backup application (namely, just makes .tar archives of the filesystem, so you can unpack that entire thing and voila. Last I checked. It may have changed since then).

It also means that if you can boot to Bootmenu, you can launch BackupMenu, thus getting the access to the file system you'd need in a case like this.

Anyway, at this stage, just go for the fiasco reflash. Hildon-Desktop is above the kernel, so just kernel-only reflashing won't fix it AFAIK. However, the Fiasco image reflash won't touch any of the stuff on your Mass Storage area, just the rootfs and optfs, I think (and you may be able to selectively flash just the RootFS image... You may have to first unpack the latest Fiasco image with the same flasher utility, and use the RootFS image itself. However, whenever I flash just kernel, the -k option works on the Fiasco image, so it should be able to read the rootfs image from inside the Fiasco image just as well as it can read the kernel image from within the Fiasco image.