With both 3.2.0-16 and 3.2.0-17, what I said in #8 still holds, with -16 and -17 behaving just as -15 did. 3.2.0-17 added something interesting though: booting 3.2.0-17-pae in recovery mode ”breaks” the -pae’s like (non-recovery booting) 3.2.0-14-pae does. To be sure, I tried recovery booting other kernels going back to 3.2.0-14, and couldn’t reproduce this with them (not even with 3.2.0-14-pae!) . Recovery booting 3.2.0-17 non-pae also doesn’t bring it on, it’s just recovery booting 3.2.0-17-pae.

The steps to reproducing this freeze with 3.2.0-17 are:
1. Boot 3.2.0-17-pae in recovery mode.
2. In the recovery menu, select ”root”.
3. From the root prompt, just reboot.
4. Boot 3.2.0-17-pae (normally).

The ”fix” also still holds: just boot a non-pae kernel once, and the pae’s again work.