Hey Andy,
In my case it hangs at the boot screen just after “setting network security” comes up. Its a server so no GUI to play with and the keyboard remains active you just can’t do anything other than reboot. Interestingly you can’t CTRL ALT Delete to reboot and hitting CTRL ALT F1 gets you another screen but then it totally hangs.
You're not seeing a kernel panic, Oops, or anything else? One thing you might try doing is enabling a serial console and send the kernel boot messages to the serial console vs. the VGA console. I can help you with the grub configuration to do that if you'd like.
When I run rip44d manually it does nothing, and more importantly adds nothing to syslog. CTRL C gets me back to the command shell so its all a bit odd.
Try running the rip44d with strace and see where it dies. Strace is an extremely helpful tool for tracing bad code. gdb too but it's more complex.
--David