That's the culprit. It doesn't like that I set my user as uid=1000 without specifying it on the kernel commandline. Unfortunately I had already resolved my problem with a complete reinstall.
It seems to me that most of the items that change settings in the bootopts.sh script should not be run every time the system boots. Once I setup my passwd, shadow, group, gshadow, slim.conf, and fstab files the init scripts should leave them alone, but this script can and sometimes does rewrite them. This is not a good architecture for these functions, as it risks making changes that are not desired by the user/sysadmin. Why not a run-once script, then the user/sysadmin could re-run if necessary (which should rarely occur.)
In case I am not being clear: IMHO, the init scripts should not make changes to any files in the /etc directory past the first boot of the system. But it does, and it is a fundamental design flaw. It will cause problems, especially on manual and manually configured installations. Do other scripts modify /etc also?