…sorry, not really useful to anyone I guess, but that’s what I learned today.
My laptop has had an uptime of a few weeks now (half of that spent in acpi-suspend), and the combined luxury of lots of RAM and not having to shut down the system lets you remember what you’re working on by simply letting leaving a million windows open.
Of course, that’s much like leaving lots of papers on your desk – when the cleaner comes you have to toss them into a drawer and after that your life is a chaos. Same with the laptop… today the one security update arrived that needs me to reboot (kernel version changed) – having to sort through lots of epiphany tabs and console sessions in GNU screen is really not much fun.
End of this most useless message.
Edit: I spotted a Dutchism there…
Learning in Linux 
Maybe, just maybe, you could have gone in to hibernation (which actually is a shutdown with a dump of memory to /dev/swap). Then, when you rebooted, your new kernel would have been loaded, together with your memory dump from /dev/swap.
Don’t know whether that would have worked, but it might have saved you some trouble. As you say it was a security update, I don’t think your kernel changed so much that a resume from hibernation would stop working with a kernel upgrade.
Sorry for the slow reaction dude… somehow Akismet put your message down as spam and was so confident about it that it didn’t notify me.
I’ll try that next time, it sounds like a nice trick. (I will have to fix hibernate first though – I created such a convoluted LVM with multiple crypt-devices setup that the standard resume script stumbles…. it can’t figure out the location of the swap partition on resuming :P)