Can you expand on what do you mean by "just popped open the kernel"? I'm genuinely interested in this kind of "tribal knowledge" you talk about. Maybe there is something we (those reading this thread) could learn and make use of.
the hardest-core thing I've done was step my way through Windows startup into the container subsystem, on a real, physical target machine I had connected to my dev machine over FireWire. I felt like Indiana Jones. (It helped having the source code though!)
Don't be afraid to dig through heap dumps or decode assembly if you have to, although when you hit that point you're probably just going to have to swap out whatever component is misbehaving