@slender: thanks for the help with this. my rootfs is 73% full with 60.4M left (out of 227M). Why is that an issue?
I have the cpu load applet installed and it often hits the red bar and not when I'm particularly doing anything interesting (though sometimes its cause its trying to connect to the 3g network). The problem is that when this happens the phone gets very sluggish and it takes forever to open a terminal and get top up and then I don't see anything weird.
This really feels to me like swapping problems from back in the days when we didn't have gigs of ram but when I check top I don't see any process eating up too much memory.
In the thread from my last post the "personal ip" widget was suggested as a possible culprit and it might be so I disabled it. I can try to kill all the other widgets for a few days and see how things go but its also hard to intentionally reproduce the problem.
I haven't been too careful about this but just opening a bunch of apps and using them the phone stays pretty responsive. After a few days however it seems that the phone randomly gets less responsive when a few browser windows are open. I haven't tested this carefully enough to be sure this is the pattern but the problem reappears a lot but I just can't consistently figure out its cause.
Today for instance I had only the music player loaded (and paused) yet when I received a phone call the phone screen stayed blank until i missed the call. It also took a few presses of the power button to get a live screen to swipe my finger accross (and my phone does not have a lock code). The only other thing besides the music player was that there was a waiting message notification for me. In the thread I linked to above message notifications seem to be linked to this sort of slowdown a lot.