Thanks for the info. The problem does seem like swapping to me and at first I thought I was just a desktop boy learning to deal with a mobile world but, and I'm sorry to make this comparison, my girlfriend's iphone 3gs can handle the same webpages+playing music without batting an eye. I'm not hitting up particularly heavy flash sites (in fact I think they're mostly flashless) and all my music is mp3 format.
If this problem is just caused by some bad widget I have enabled then that's great and I'll try to figure it out and disable it. But others really don't find the whole system becomes sluggish when using the music player?
Regarding your other comments: I'd love to see the firmware updates that speed up Ovi maps (right now I prefer to use my gf's iphone when we're lost), speed up the camera and GPS locking, give us a portrait mode virtual keyboard, I could go on...
I knew going into this the extra apps would be on us and i wanted it that way but its annoying that the core is missing essential features and no one but nokia can do anything about it. Also everyone said this thing was blazing but it really doesn't feel that way :-(