boot failed with gzip'ed modules

Hi,

I have a live CD that has a GENERIC kernel and that loads some modules before 
booting.  They have been gzip'ed to save space however suddenly the booting 
has stopped.   The kernel loads and then after the first line of the modules 
to load it stops:

CD Loader 1.2

Building the boot loader arguments
Looking up /BOOT/LOADER... File not found
Looking up /boot/loader... Found
Relocating the loader and the BTX
Starting the BTX loader

BTX loader 1.00  BTX version is 1.02
Consoles: internal video/keyboard
BIOS CD is cd0
BIOS drive A: is disk0
BIOS 638kB/260032kB available memory

FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1
(DragonSA_at_dragon, Fri Apr 25 16:40:18 SAST 2008)
Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf
/boot/kernel/kernel test=0x74bb28 data=0xfe590+0xfc4f0 
syms=[0x8+0xc1830+0x8+0xac76c]
/boot/kernel/unionfs.ko |

The current was csup'ed today (a previous system from 13th April worked fine)

My loader.conf: 
geom_label_load="YES"
geom_uzip_load="YES"
unionfs_load="YES"
zlib_load="YES"
init_script="/chroot"
init_chroot="/base"

and the files:
dragon# cd boot/kernel/
dragon# ls -l
total 4416
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel     8815 Apr 25 17:40 geom_label.ko.gz
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel     4145 Apr 25 17:40 geom_uzip.ko.gz
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  4425256 Apr 25 17:40 kernel.gz
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    19775 Apr 25 17:40 unionfs.ko.gz
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    28540 Apr 25 17:40 zlib.ko.gz

(there is a significant saving in size [and a pitty kldload does not like 
gzip'ed modules... project idea :-) {with possibly other formats, i.e. 
bzip2?}])

Oh, on an aside.  What is the BTX and why is the bootloader i386 even for an 
amd64 system (I suspect it is because there is no need for an amd64 
bootloader [unless kernels and modules suddenly exceed 4GB 8-/ ])?

Thank you for your time

David