You are very welcome. I'm happy to help where I can. I can't see how the kernel change would have done it, but you never know, particularly when running on a semi-non-standard hardware (meaning you qnap/cisco box).
I suggest you do some routine clonezilla or fsarchiver backups, particularly before and after you change something major. They can save you many hours of time re-installing and re-configuring.
Personally I have a daily fsarchiver rotating backup running based on a custom script I wrote, I have only had to rely on then once, but once is enough.
