Again reporting with Nexus S, 2.3.4, GRJ22.

After reading ttthhh123's entry I decided to power off my phone and try a boot at normal battery charge (80%).  First try, and it failed to boot past the "Google"  and hard buttons lit.  Several battery re-insertions and reboots later, got a successful boot.

So it's not just a matter of full discharge of the battery... in actuality I don't normally power down the phone, but a fully discharged battery powered down the phone for me, and then I encountered the boot problem.

A shared experience for several of us (anupam, TribalGeneral, ttthhh123 and me) is that we also had the freeze problem before 2.3.4.