When I was having different and obviously filesystem problems, booting up with a reiser4-enabled livecd and rebuilding the tree fixed my fs. This is of course only a very small piece of anecdotal evidence regarding the reliability of fsck.reiser4's ability to fix the filesystem.
Did you check dmesg for file access or write problems? That will tell you if the problem is really the filesystem. The crashes could have been due to other problems (on from-source distros, reverse dependencies often need to be rebuilt to fix linking). The CD I used was the Conrad livecd--http://www.elfenbeinturm.cc/download/. SystemrescueCD also has r4 support. Chris
