Sorry for the triple post. You wouldn't believe where the answer was.... *in the faq*

I did some googling on the reiserfs error in the boot text and the developers/bugs list archives showed some hits. After that, I googled for the "player received signal 11" error and got a hit on the same list. Some poor chap had the same error. Mr Fabris pointed him at a FAQ entry. It sounds like a broken track is responsible for hanging the player. I booted into bash (again, FAQ helped) and started the player with no playlist. It worked!

My only remaining problem is working out which of the 5000-odd tracks was playing when the player app crashed!

Thanks sincerely for the help you gave, and to Google, and to Tony Fabris... is there an award for best FAQ ever?

Ta!

-nic