Many thanks Gnarlodious and Afred DeRose, it's nice to know there is support out there. 🙂
Today's cold boot appeared to run without issue today. What's changed? Last night I disconnected two external USB2.0 hard drives of the Seagate "GoFlex" and "FreeAgent" variety then ran "Repair Disk Permissions" of the Macintosh HD. Next, I proceded to browse the web the rest of the evening and finally shutdown the computer before bed.
After today's first cold boot I shutdown the iMac, reconnected the external drives and booted up once again. No issues presented themselves at this point.
I am currently verifying the two external drives which is taking a while.
I have no idea if verifying and repairing disks and/or their "Permissions" has any impact on events giving rise to the "Kernel Panic" issue.
Yesterday I had to inlude a forward slash "/" (or was it a backslash?) like this: "/exit". When I entered just "exit" (minus the forward slash) the cursor just returned down the the next line. I did not exit "DOS", hehe. 🙂
I have no idea whether the issue is truly resolved even though the system today just cold booted twice and will go take a look at those links you posted.
I just wanted to share my experience so far.
Many thanks once again. 🙂