Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot - moan & groan: part 2

I happen to have 11.10 not only on my personal netbook but on my work station too. So here I came to work this morning (i.e., half an hour ago) and pushed the start button. The magical message shows, which goes like this: "errors found on drive /. Push F to attempt to fix errors, I to ignore, S to skip mounting and M to fix manually".

Pushed F to fix errors. The message then turns into error message connected to /tmp mount point.  The cause of this unexpected behavior may had something to do with leaving the USB stick last night in, and booting system today with it in. But I'm not sure. Asked a friend that also has 11.10 and says he never experienced something like this so it may be a very isolated case I'm talking about here. You'd think there would be no mount errors but seems the 11.10 is still unstable (considering that the work station was shutdown properly as always).

So, pushed F to fix errors: waited for a while without results. Pressed restart, removed the USB flash, this time the screen with recovery mode appears. Selecting recovery mode, I had the chance to run clean, dpkg, fsck then resume. Same error shows ("errors found on drive /. Push F to attempt to fix etc."). Okay, then let's do it manually. Pressed M to attempt manual fixing. Then console-mode shows, and I ran fsck without arguments. I spent about 10 minutes pressing on <y> on prompts from system regarding corrupted inodes. Fix? Clear? Allocate? yeah. Then Ctrl+D to exit shell and reboot. Same error shows, tried my luck with F again (attempt fix errors). Waited for 30s, then finally the login screen showed normally and everything is fine now.

I may be masochistic but I'm really happy that even these types of situations can be handled somehow by the user, this is why I prefer Unix myself. I must confess I had this type of issue (filesystem errors) with 9.10 and 10.04 once in a while. I'd do the same thing with 9.10 (run dpkg, fsck etc.) but almost always 10.04 would fix errors with the initial disk scan&fix automatically.  As a sidenote, 11.10 also runs pretty successfully the initial disk scan&fix (if it hadn't been for the situation this morning, I'd remove the "pretty") but is it just a figment of my mind that it seems to need the scan with a higher frequency than 10.04?