Just an update.
It appears the issue is that HTC's calendar takes awhile to "paint" items that are set to reoccur. I redid my calendar and stripped out a lot of those and it sped up the time needed to paint them in, but it was still kinda slow and obnoxious.
So I found ThumbCal (
http://thumbapps.com/web/pages/thumbcal/overview.php) and WOW, what a great program. Just took the HTC calendar off of my TouchFlo bar and use this exclusively. Purchased it about 2 hours after I installed the demo. Instant painting, finger friends, integrated tasks. It combines all of the best components of the HTC's calendar, the normal WM Outlook calendar, and then adds a lot of neat features on top of it.
Thank you again, though, djheir, for pointing me toward Nuevasync. I'm switched to that for contacts and calendars (contacts are free as well) as it's far more robust than Google's own Sync is anyway. For email I've just got an IMAP account programmed into the phone. Perfect!