stuck on boot, no SSH available

[geekness]

So this afternoon I decided it was high time to update all my xbian packages, and I did so through the XBMC settings interface.
All worked OK.

When I restarted I found my remote was not working correctly, only giving up, down, left, right.

So after a number of re-starts, I found this thread:
http://forum.xbian.org/thread-1247-page-2.html

Which lead me to this thread:
http://forum.xbian.org/showthread.php?tid=2003
I promptly read through the lot and followed the instructions on the first post.

but also at the end I rebooted.
When the XBIAN started to reboot, it froze on the first instance of a character which is an underscore I believe, or it might be a dash, not really relevant I guess.
Anyway, a number of power downs and ups, and im still getting the same thing.

Tried to SSH in through putty, but im getting timed out.

Please tell me I can fix this without re-installing the whole thing again, that would be painful!!
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

G

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hmm come to think of it, I don't think I did the last set of commands right

Terminal

# service lirc restart
# service xbmc restart

I think i left the # in when i pasted the code in one at a time, so the services never restarted prior to doing a reboot.

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OH, also I forgot to mention im running xbian from USB instead of the SD card.