Thanks Darius,
You made me laugh. If any one of these things were to happen separately I'd have worked the problem and sorted it out, but I was really truly blown away by the combination. Heck the reboot to the recovery environment would be a great gag on it's own. If there was a way to induce this particular combination on demand, I'm sure it would make for some GREAT youtube videos.
I've now realised how I ended up with the recovery envrionment at boot, I was wanting a clean boot and having hardware issues so I did an NVRAM/PRAM reset.