> 	The machine is currently in an office in NY, and I am in an office
> 	in Melbourne Australia.  There is the chance that if something goes
> 	seriously wrong during a build or re-boot that the system may not
> 	come back and there is no one around who could do a thing about it.

There's always a chance that something goes wrong especially if you muck
with kernel and/or system programs. If you want to boot a new kernel
instead of a known-to-work one, there's no reliable way to predict what
your chances of survival are..

If your machine is happy at the moment, stay with what you've got unless
you're desperate for some new feature/bug fix/whatever (or are dying to
find out what happens in this type of situation :-)

-pk