1) It was a 1.1 alpha bug

Duh... Forgot about your playing with the alpha...
But I hope it isn't something in 1.1 that caused this - wouldn't want
any more delays there

2) It was a hardware problem with my disk drive

If this is the case then I must say that you've had some bad luck with
your disks

3) Something about my custom "picker" init mounted the drives wrong

Can't say that I can see anything in it that'd cause any problems...

4) I was running Displayserver.

Hmmmmm... did you ever experiece any lock ups or killed processes
during fsck'ing? Only case I can think of that could cause a problem
would be if the system ran out of memory totally and killed of the
fsck... Propably a good idea to stop Displayserver when fsck'ing