I had the issue from the original description.
I was able to stop it manually using 'mysqladmin shutdown -u root -p
...' Then followed the instructions here:
http://mirzmaster.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/mysql-access-denied-for-user-
debian-sys-maintlocalhost/
And after starting it again I was
Also to follow up on comment #29, after fixing the first issue, I still
encountered this error, which I suspect may have been caused due to the
initial upgrade failures:
ERROR 1577 (HY000) at line 1: Cannot proceed because system tables
used by Event Scheduler were found damaged at server start
