Note to self: When your Macbook is having repeated issues waking from sleep, don’t sleep it in the middle of installing a big piece of software that has a complicated installer… On forcing a reboot the damned thing hung at the ‘Starting Mac OS X’ scroll bar screen, and stayed hung. Looking at the syslog at the console showed the last boot activity was coreservicesd crashing. Uh Oh, time for some panicked googling.
Solution: Boot into single user mode using Command-S, mount the root filesystem rw, then: mv /Library/Caches /foo followed by reboot. Everything seems fine now, just need to restart that installation 