bitcoind is crashing. Start BitcoinQt manually and see what it has to say for itself
Sorry for not updating.
I tried to start bitcoin-qt it just open the splash window and nothing beyond that point. and get
bus error (core dumped) bitcoin-qt
That is pretty bad. Either your bitcoin-qt executable is corrupt, or your RAM is bad, or there is some very bad data in the local copy of the block chain causing bitcoin-qt to crash like this. If I were you I would start by running an overnight test of the RAM (I believe that there is a RAM test on the Ubuntu installation disks, RAM errors are surprisingly common) and then try to reinstall bitcoin-qt. If both fails, try deleting all of bitcoin-qt's data and let it download again (or start by torrenting the latest snapshot of the block chain).
Did a memory test, no errors, deleted block chain and now downloading the new blockchain via torrent... seems like it was corrupted. thanks picobit.
edit: ill report back after i download the whole blockchain again.