Hmm, I've uninstalled ext3 and seen no problems running my empeg this morning. Last night I saw ide errors on the console indicating drive timeouts and read failures, with the last line indicating a reset of ide0 was done.

EXT3-fs error (device ide0(3,4)): ext3_readdir: bad entry in directory #2049: directory entry across blocks - offset=768, inode=536872065, rec_len=8208, name_len=5

The above is one of the other errors I saw, I did get this quite a bit (similar errors, but unfortunatly I didn't have them logged).

I'll continue to let it run today with no ext3, and try putting it on again tomorrow.