I finally got fed up with my machine crashing/hanging every 2 hours (bad enough that there was no ping response) and trashing the filesystem. So I've upgraded from 2.4.8 to 2.4.9-ac14 and converted my filesystem to ext3 (which totally rules) and not only has system performance increased, but the hangs have apparently stopped.
with regards to devel I've just been playing around with libsdl for the past few days.