> Any suggestions for a better way to do this in the future will be
> greatly appreciated :-)

I saw that it didn't make logs and didn't trust myself not to do something 
stupid, so to make sure I didn't lose anything I did something along the 
lines of:
$ pkg_info > pkgbefore
$ pkg_check ...
$ pkg_info > pkgafter
then sorted and compared the two files to see if anything was missing.

I also removed some large packages (kde*, gnome etc) by hand and recompiled 
them manually afterwards when I realised it was going to take months 
compiling those many times over.

-David