Good news (depending on your point of view)
We obviously have different points of view ;-)
It is going to be a few days before I can look into this as my server/build machine melted down last weekend and I haven't got it fixed yet. If you don't want to wait for me you can try grabbing the stock linux kernel source version 2.2.20 and the
ext3-0.0.7a patch. Patch the 2.2.20 source and then diff transaction.c from it with the version from a recent hijack patched empeg kernel. Or try to compile an empeg kernel with the newer transaction.c you patched. Perhaps I screwed up something with all the patches I had to hack in by hand to get ext3 working against the older empeg kernel source.
If you didn't follow that give me a couple of days and I'll try to take a look myself
-Mike