If a gentoo based machine crashes during the middle of an emerge (ie. hardware lockup), when rebooted and another emerge run, the emerge will stop functioning after >>>> emerge <package> to / running a top shows that sandbox is running with 99.0% CPU, so it appears to be an issue with sandbox being terminated unexpectedly. I am currently running 1.3b_test, so i dont know if this is an issue with 1.2.
more information: It seems that portage gets hung up due to some files in /tmp that are left due to the unclean shutdown. Removing everything in tmp fixes the issue. Ive also noticed that sandbox will steadly eat up more memory until there is none left in this non functional condition.
This should be fixed by now.
I havent done any extensive testing, but it appears that its fixed with 1.4.1 rc1. Thanks for all the hard work all.