Sean,

I am not at home so I can't share my notes I scribbled down the last time I bumped into these troubles.

I would try a remove (sudo gainroot -> rm -f <stale handle>). Probably that will not work, so the next step would be to boot into an alternative, if you have that installed, like Nitdroid or so. Next option would be ssh or Rob1n's backupmenu. Apart from that there is also a recovery console, but that requires bootmenu to be installed.