[Jester]

I saw the same issue when I rebuild an extra pi 2 days ago, once it gets passed building the cache/banner/thumbsnails it works fine, but initially it freezes.

I'm running this btw (shouldnt matter but you could remove it and see what happens with running the defaults, currently both openelec and raspbmc set these on their default builds)
<imageres>540</imageres>
<fanartres>720</fanartres>

P.S.
Trying to figure out what OMX does here
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master...XImage.cpp

from line ~670