That's funny, I tried your upgrade last night and had the same problem. I didn't reply to your request earlier because I thought it was my kernel causing this behaviour. Have you got the default kernel running ? Now after every soft-reboot ( reboot -f in shell ) the garbage appears....
I had the same garbage when I deleted the IP-information in config.ini ( see bug-reports ), but this was only once and the empeg rebooted OK after power-loss
I've got an MK2.

Frank van Gestel