Mepis 8.0 on pendrive bites the dust

I already posted about booting to Mepis 8 on my EeePC 901 from a 4 GB pendrive and it worked very well if maybe just a little slower than if it had been on one of the internal SSDs.
I had noticed, however, that the ext3 filesystem was causing some problems in that booting occasionally stopped because no journaling system was found. However, running "fsck -y /dev/sdc1" on the two Mepis partitions on the pendrive always resuscitated the ext3 fs and booting became possible again.
Yesterday, I did quite a lot on Mepis including setting up 3D effects (compiz fusion) and Kiba-Dock.
Kiba-Dock worked very well although, perhaps, not quite as good as it does on Linux Mint. To install it involved the following:
1. Download the Kiba-Dock deb from here
2. Install libglitz1, gconf-editor and python-gnome2-extras from Synaptic
3. Install the Kiba-Dock deb using KPackage
4. Go to ~/.kiba-dock and create a "profiles" directory
5. With the compositor running (compiz-fusion), start Kiba-Dock from a terminal with the command "kiba-dock". The blue striped empty dock should appear.
6. Add launchers as usual from the main panel.
7. I was able to add my special .png image to produce the "no dock background" look that I like.
Note, however, that the clean look afforded by this background image, removes the text names for the launchers which can be inconvenient if you have a lot of them.

I wasn't able to run the kiba-systray.py command as it complained of a lack of a gconf module even though gconf and gconf-editor were installed.
Nevertheless, right-clicking on the dock gave a context menu including gset-kiba. However, the useful "restart kiba-dock" is only available from the systray icon.

Although, I rebooted to Mepis at least 3 times yesterday without problem, today when I tried I, once again, got the "no journal" error. Running fsck got the ext3 fs back but Mepis froze during the boot just as the GUI screen was about to start filling the upper panel. I tried this about 5 times with the same result.
If the ext3 journal is the primary cause of this problem, the irony is that I don't want ext3 at all. However, the only fs options offered during the Mepis install were ext3 and reiserfs.
Not sure what I can do now but I'm thinking about trying reiserfs.