ubuntu probs

I have upgraded my warty install to hoary. I recently ran an apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade.

Everything was working fine. I get home tonight and try and login and ssh disconnects me. Login via lish. Can't even ssh to localhost from the console. MySQL is dead. Reboot the linode, mysql won't start, syslog indicates there's a problem with a corrupt library. OpenSSH won't accept any connections.

I installed dropbear ssh (made for embedded systems, statically compiled), and that worked fine, but somehow I managed to hose things up to the point where I couldn't even login to lish (I think installing runit, which was a suggested package from dropbear hosed things up).

So I shrunk my partition and swap, created a new image, booted that, mounted my old image's partition and am backing up my data. It's going to take several hours, and I'll guess I'll be reinstalling my linode from scratch tomorrow (gotta get some sleep).

Anyone have any ideas on the original problem? I'd like to avoid it in the future.