Meh my Eeee had just decided that it did not want to start X due to an internal error. A most odd occurrence and after a bit of digging I found the culprit, a read only file system.

It seems my disk had a couple of errors on it and thus had been mounted read only. A quick sudo up to root privs and brisk fsck later, reboot and done 🙂

One of those things I suppose…