This may be a good time to mention that...
If you really hate udev but have installed some package which depends on it, then it can be disabled with the usual method of renaming the init script. Yes, that simple.
Now it appears that the infamous #317333 is not caused by old kernel versions, but is just generic bug that may be triggered if you are unlucky. Too bad that neither me nor the upstream maintainers can reproduce it, so fixing it could take some time. This means that the current udev release could work with 2.6.11 kernels too, but don't think it's useful to lower the minimum version to have to raise it again in a few weeks.
All this is a bit annoying, but I can't see what else I could have done without knowing this. I'm just grateful that yesterday some more people took the time to ask me for clarifications instead of flaming.