This is probably caused by bad gain staging. Especially with already distorted guitars its really easy to miss the fact that you might be driving your front end too hard. If you were using a limiter and it was actually limiting then you were probably driving your preamps way too hot at the tracking stage. This is exactly why I do not advocate the use of compression in tracking unless you are using it purely for gain staging. It is likely that you were hitting the preamps way too hard if there was a limiter in place, and then quite possibly driving the compressor with an already distroted signal into even more distortion. This is easy to have masked when you are tracking heavy guitars, especially if your control room is not isolated well enough from the amp cab itself. If you are hearing the amp cab in your control room and it is competing at all with your monitors, some of that extra distortion may not have been easily audible over the wash from the guitar cab. Upon playback however when there is not other sound to mask this it becomes more apparent, especially after you start pushing the guitars higher up in the mix. Try tracking with a much lower setting and if you really feel like you need more, allow the distressor to push the input up a little and keep the output a reasonable level. You should be able to get a pretty good output form the distressor even at fast attack and release times.