Core won't start anymore

Well I finally managed to break my 1.1 Beta system. For the record, I do not intend to fix this as I will simply move on to RC1. However I would like to do an autopsy to see what the final straw was that broke the camels back, for educational purposes, and I'm hoping someone could give me a few pointers in the right direction.

Symptoms:
- Core hangs during startup whilst generating skins for Orbiter #136 with the progressbar animation crawling.
- Huge numbers of automount errors (on tty11) lookup failed/no such device. (these also seem to be filling up dmesg)

dcerouter_21704:~# screen -r
There are several suitable screens on:
8611.UpdateMedia (Detached)
6383.VoiceMailMonitor (Detached)
4704.XWindowSystem (Detached)
4556.DhcpdPlugin (Detached)

According to top the CPUs are about 80-90% idle.

At a glance there doesn't seem to be much unusual in the logfiles either.

Obviously something is wrong but I'm not sure where to start looking, any pointers would be appreciated and please keep in mind that I only want to learn some more about LMCE troubleshooting, not completely fix the system I very likely broke myself (by messing around so much).