Naah. My theory:
The drives were put into r/w by emplode. Win98 then crashed, leaving the drives in r/w. When win98 gets rebooted, emplode cannot connect to the empeg because the empeg already has a sync session in progress. empeg gets powered-down with the discs still mounted r/w, and the corruption occurs in the main superblock, necessitating the use of an alternative superblock to complete e2fsck.

This is probably worth FAQing. ie, the part that if you see a bad superblock message that causes fsck to fail then to specify -b 32768. Although input from the empeg guys should probably be sought.