Any clues as to whether the empeg software is going to move across to reiserfs in up coming releases...? or is it something we could use ourselves by manually converting partitions...

ReiserFS was added as research work for a different project (which ended up using the 2.4 kernel). I think in theory 2.0 should just deal with the music partitions (/drive0 and /drive1) being ReiserFS. But I haven't tried it for a while and it's certainly not officially supported. Also, there's no way of converting an ext2 partition into a ReiserFS one in-place: you'd have to wipe and resynchronise all your music.

(would then have to make modifications to the base install after every update to change the mount types before the empeg would be useable again)

Not if only the music partitions are ReiserFS; you would, though, always have to stick a new kernel on, as stock car2 kernels don't have ReiserFS enabled.

Peter