Slackware :: Can't Boot Laptop - Sequence Halts While Loading Syslogd

All of a sudden my laptop decided to not bootup. It stops while loading syslogd. I started up in single user mode and added a few echo statements in rc.syslog so it looks like:

Code:

This means that execution of the script doesn't seem to get past the "/usr/sbin/syslogd" line. Well at least thats the case in the first 2-3 minutes. Afterwards my screen gets flooded with the next echo I placed "caught in the loooooop!".

Again, stating the obvious, the script reads on and gets caught in the while loop. obviously there is no /dev/log and something must have messed up the execution of syslogd. what could that be it?

Recently I was fiddling around with jackd and trying to setup a jack-rack on my laptop. To do that I had to recompile alsa-driver from scratch in order to include the virtual soundcard driver. I also had to rebuild the mainline kernel to add low-latency (I did not switch to kernel-rt). Overall, I've been running with a custom kernel more than 2 months now and never had a problem with syslogd startup. The new low latency custom kernel is just like the previous one but with only difference the low latency setting. With the low latency kernel I've been using the pc for approx a week and have done 5+ reboots. So the problem appeared now out of nowhere...

If I disable rc.syslog and I start the pc, and then start it up, syslogd with execute nicely and quickly as if there was no problem, ever...