Comment 22 for bug 800701

as further background information on possible causes for this:

the message in question will occur in the log any time upstart is told to (re)enter runlevel 2. i.e, if you type "telinit 2", you'll see the result both in the output of "last -x head" (because wtmp records the (null) level transition) and in the output of "dmesg", where the plymouth-stop pre-start scriptlet records its demise.

(also note that the script /etc/init/plymouth-stop.conf is *not* consulted when the addition to dmesg occurs -- "ls -lu" will show you that. the pre-start segment of that script seems to be cached elsewhere. this may not be relevant, but is simply a factoid i discovered while attempting to isolate the source of the "terminated with status 1" message.)