XMS Horror Story?

So I've been trying to redo my main front end computer...right now I want to have it to be as simplistic as possible, with the following criteria met:
- Run fluxbox
- Play games
- Play music
- RBACish security(More on that when I'm done)
- Be insanely fast for everyday tasks
- Automatic backups

Well I was *almost* done yesterday, I had Gentoo installed and booting, alsa set up, some of the roles defined, and X11 working. The only thing I didn't have was OpenGL support for X working yet. Somewhere along the way I was doing a emerge --deep world and ended up completely freezing everything while trying to load flgrx(ATI closed source driver) and having to hard-off the machine. Well, udev stopped working properly upon reboot, and emerge wouldn't go to try to repair anything. I tried a few things such as xfs_repair but to no avail. Right now I'm reinstalling from scratch :( I'm not sure if this was the infamous problem with xfs zeroing data on unclean mounts during a write, or if my emerge was in a state of limbo. I'm still sticking with XFS but may change to JFS if this ends up being a regular problem. Thinking back I should have tried chrooting in a LiveCD and see if emerge could fix it, hopefully there is no next time to try it. I haven't had a hard crash that wasn't heat related for at least 2 years now, so probably once everything is set up it will be okay especially after my backup stuff is done.