New setup has been stable for almost a month now

It works! It works!

No major problems since the new setup was implemented. The boot time for the ubuntu box is now reasonable, I removed all unnecessary bullcrap from init. One interesting point is that my NFS shares (music, movies) has to be mounted on both server and client?! If they are only mounted on server (which I thought would be all I need) the videos show in menus ok, but playing just wont work. Apparently xinelibout in fact does not stream the external files over the network but instead orders the client to play them from a specific location.