Finally got round to doing some more testing on this as promised.

I did 8 full resets and loaded my music via mass storage drag and drop from my macbook. The music totaled 37.63GB and is ripped to my mac via tunes. The album art is manually attached to each album in iTunes rather that using the get album artwork.

The test results are:

2 tests - airplane mode disabled (failed)
2 tests - airplane mode enabled (failed)
2 tests - airplane mode enabled fastern9 installed (successful)
2 tests - airplane mode disabled fastern9 installed (successful)

It would appear that airplane mode doesn't have any effect in resolving the problems with indexing your music songs and album art work. However when you install fastern9 indexing songs and album artwork is flawless (with or without airplane mode enabled).

Sorry to mislead you guys earlier.

However this is still a good find... and enhances my experience with the stock music player.