After re-reading the post I've got some more to add! I also got the memory violation error when starting up empacman using a pre-init script starting with M.

It looked to me as if, for some reason, the player and empacman were starting simultaneously - perhaps trying to grab the same resources!? dunno enough about linux to be honest. Although both programs seemed to work I didn't like the look of it, so I now start empacman with an N script (empacman is located on the hda2 partition).