I've made some headway here. (Some, not much). There were a couple other threads that popped up with people having some similar issues, mostly the slowness and the lack of booting. It turns out that everybody having these issues had just installed VideoCenter. Something that I hadn't thought about simply because I hadn't really gotten a chance to use it. I don't think that anyone came up with a good reason why this had happened, and I just decided not to install it from now on. (I'll file a bug when I get a few free minutes).

Now, there was also the issue of general slowness, which was caused by /etc/init.d/metalayer-crawler0, which when you run "/etc/init.d/metalayer-crawler0 stop" as root, the device is a lot happier. I should also note that the metalayer-crawler was not always out of control, this might have occurred after installing videocenter, or something else. I'm not sure.

The kagu issue, for me, seems to be restricted to kagu's performance. While it is my default media player, it takes forever and a day to get the thing running. It took over a half and hour last night to load before I gave up on it and stopped paying attention. (And of course, the battery was dead this morning).

So, ascherjim, I'd try stopping the metalayer-crawler daemon first, then looking to see if there is anything else going on. You can always start it back up if you want to, though I'm pretty sure that if you don't use maemo's default media player stuff, it's basically 100% useless.