Here's the resolution of the situation that came up in this thread. The looping was being caused by some misconfiguration in fstab that was confusing the mount point of /home. Centurion_Dan figured it out after we set up a remote-tunnel to NZ and he took a look! However, before that happened, I had already nuked the 'unofficial' alpha to remove a variable in the debugging process. RIP! Since we had already set up the tunnel, we went ahead and did a net install from an 'official' iso. Then he went in and set up the mount points in both fstabs so all is working properly now. FWIW, even before I mucked up the wheezy fstab, slim never loaded from the very first boot of the 'unofficial' alpha2 install. Always had to startx. Maybe because login is disabled on the live disk?
So now I am in the process of pimping out devuan. Have even gotten suspend to work but only from terminal with pm-suspend. I can live with that.
Only thing I don't like about xfce 4.10 are the huge popup tooltips that appear when hovering over the Desktop icons. I'm working on that over at the xfce forum. Have made some progress . . .
I'll be needing to install a compatible version of refractasnapshot and installer. So it would be appreciated if you could point me in the right direction for both the file and how to install it if it's not a .deb.