I just had the same problem described here (Although I didn't know it at first with my custom init). I restored a default 1.03 setup, and would watch the empeg boot, load the player, then appear to freeze. I plugged in a serial cable and saw it dumped to the shell. I did the above procedure with dd then running the player with -i, and it fixed it.

Now here is the odd thing. The song the empeg was hung on didn't have a problem when I played it again. Also, when the problem started, my custom init would keep reloading the player. Sometimes it would dump out when it loaded all the way and displayed the song info, other times it would lock on "Loading visuals" and other times, it would lock on the song from the previous shutdown.

I've notice some gaps in playback as well recently when starting up the player. (Usually only lasting a short time after it boots, 30 or so seconds, and it dosen't happen all the time) Ram tests do pass fine though, even when I ran it when the player was locking. I'm not sure if this problem affected the lock or not.

I'm just glad I was able to pull all the music back off via FTP, even though it did lock a few times doing that as well.