I wonder how often something similar to this scenario has happened when new Linux users have to wait a long time for their system to finish fscking on every 30 reboots, and asking how to skip it or keep it from happening gets responses along the lines of "ura luser", "lol you turn off your computer?", and "xyz has been banned from #linux (go back to Windows)".
OS/2 was nowhere close to being as stable as Linux. There were all kinds of normal usage scenarios which cause the system to lock or crash. (OS/2 had the same "49.7 day bug" as Windows and nobody noticed for years.)
Probably not that often. Usually it tells you to press a key to skip it. If they bothered to read that it's fscking then they would know how to skip it in the majority of cases. (I know that GNOME and XFCE do this. Pretty sure KDE does too when I used it.)
In the case of OS/2 This sounds like a problem that could have been solved with a well placed printf call during the boot routine. (Like say; at the the beginning.)
