Flash Booting

[chuckr]

This all happened about a week ago, but I had a bit of health issues and needed to get that under control first. My flash booting, which had worked perfectly, now stops immediately after login. I think that I probably caused this myself, I was trying to get /usr/local/lib added to the list of dirs scanned for shared libs (on startup), so I ran ldconfig and created what looked like a fine /var/run/ld.so.hints. I tried to do a reboot, and that's when I first hit this problem: immediately after I enter the password, the white text entry box disappears, the prompt changes to "Please login", and it goes no further, you can't get to the GUI. This isn't anything at all to do with timeouts, because I have twice let it wait 48 hours, and it still won't change.

Booting off internal storage works fine. I tried recreating the flash boot disk by rerunning mkfs.ext2, and again untarring the boot image tarball, and nothing changes. Can I please get a few guesses as to what's wrong?

Thanks