I installed a few programs and (unsuccessfully) easy debian and now my tablet is slow to install other programs, slow to load programs, and slow at doing basically everything. I can view the processes and it seems like there are an awful lot of them loaded into memory. When trying to view an image (from a camera, 4 mb) earlier, it gave me an error saying that i'm out of memory. I've only had this for a few days, so compared to when it had nothing, it's very sluggish now. Any advice on either removing the tons of processes loaded or making it faster? Should I uninstall some programs/libraries?

Honestly, I'd just reflash and start over more carefully.

First, I would extend your memory to the internal sd card. Also, can you list the programs you installed? It's possible one of them caused the problem...

look for the dreaded meta crawler. It always seems to slow everything and eat battery. Another app is rss feed reader in applets. It some times gets activated on its own and it eats all your memory.
Do dual boot by pb called easy dual boot and partition for swap. Then you can run 8 apps at same time. Also use querty12 speed rotation app. It will give you rotation and speed your Nxx to 400mhz. Hope this helps.