Description of Problem:
First boot after dirty poweroff gets stuck recovering journal

How Reproducible:
It did it several times, enough for me to write most of this bug report.  
Now I can not reproduce the bug.  

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Normal boot (after clean poweroff)
2. Turn off power (dirty!)
3. Turn on power and wait until it gets stuck
4. Turn off power (dirty!)
5. Turn on power.  

Actual Results:
Step 3 gets stuck checking filesystems: 
   /usr: recovering journal
hard drive light is stuck on.  
no head seek thrashing sounds

Step 5 boots successfully with following sample from /var/log/boot.log:
   Sep  4 20:11:09 localhost fsck: /usr: recovering journal
   Sep  4 20:11:09 localhost fsck: /usr: clean, 68423/263296 files, 431622/526128 b

Expected Results:
Successful boots after each dirty poweroff.  

Other Info: 
All the partitions are ext3 partitions except for swap.