"Loading hardware drivers" hangs on boot

Could you try leaving the system for three minutes instead of pressing Control-C and see whether it continues on its own?

Could you attach /var/log/udev

it does continue on its own (from past experience), the current udev log is from a ctrl-c time, so I'll attach it, but when i reboot tomorrow I'll let it run and see if it differs and if so attach that one too.

without ctrl-c'ing it, it seems to have the same exact log file produced.

Good, that's consistent ... can you attach it anyway, there may be timing differences of interest

ask and you shall recieve.

The problem is being caused by incorrect values in your /etc/iftab file.

Make sure any lines have "arp 1" on the end (it's likely it's clashing while renaming your wifi0 and eth1 to the same name)

If they do already, try just commenting out the lines in this file and see if it boots normally. If it does, make sure the MAC addresses listed in this file match those in the file, and if not, amend them.

I'm confused, I never touched this file (never even knew it existed).

this is the file

# This file assigns persistent names to network interfaces. See iftab(5).
eth0 mac 00:0d:60:b1:b9:35
ath0 mac 00:05:4e:48:9f:a7

what should I change?

Add " arp 1" to the end of each line, in particular, the ath0 line

# This file assigns persistent names to network interfaces. See iftab(5).
eth0 mac 00:0d:60:b1:b9:35 arp 1
ath0 mac 00:05:4e:48:9f:a7 arp 1

as I never created that file or modified it by hand, is it a bug that it didn't contain it?

it was a bug for a period during breezy's development; did you originally install this machine from a development release of breezy (or maybe dapper?)

it's been long-since fixed

probably breezy, but can't remember that far back, but in general I do
follow development.