Comment 8 for bug 682831

Well, I think I've eliminated plymouth as the source of the problem. I did:
a.) booted ami-2c738545 with pv-grub kernel aki-407d9529
us-east-1 ami-2c738545 canonical ebs/ubuntu-lucid-daily-i386-server-20101214
us-east-1 aki-407d9529 amazon pv-grub-hd0-V1.01-i386.gz
$ cat /proc/cmdline
root=LABEL=uec-rootfs ro console=hvc0
$ dpkg -S /boot/vmlinuz-$(uname -r)
linux-image-2.6.32-310-ec2: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-310-ec2

b.) wrote a MARKER message to /dev/console and added the /sbin/init hack
c.) rebooted
d.) collected console
e.) installed from maverick-updates:
libdrm-nouveau1_2.4.21-1ubuntu2.1_i386.deb
libplymouth2_0.8.2-2ubuntu5.1_i386.deb
plymouth_0.8.2-2ubuntu5.1_i386.deb
plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text_0.8.2-2ubuntu5.1_i386.deb
f.) wrote a MARKER mesage to /dev/console
g.) rebooted
h.) collected console (attached here)

The maverick plymouth with lucid kernel still shows the issue.
Next thing to try swapping out is the kernel.