It's pretty horrible that when the reiserfs beacome corrupt, the whole system goes down. Is this going to be addressed in future reiserfs versions??
I don't mean to split hairs, but any filesystem corruption could bring the system down. Desn't matter if its ext3 or NTFS or what. Yes, some are more resistant to physical hardware damage, but when your filesystem gets corrupted bad things happen. If you damage some filesystem metadata then the system is going to have problems no matter what. Having said that reiserfs is definitely being worked on and always being improved. It doesn't have the years behind it ext2/3 does but its definitely stable. If you have a read or a write error as Carlos suggested then its possible its a bad block that is causing the problems. Similar things would happen with other filesystems.