[revaaron]

I had this same exact issue on 6.1. It's manila's messaging. It's loading all the 18K or 21K texts. When you sent/receive txts it will have to re-load the updated 18K-21K txts all over again.
What I do so that I have my txts available and searchable is that I use
Efficasoft Mobile Express to export the txt to a .txt file.
then I use a perl script I wrote to turn the .txt into a mbox format.
then I load it up into thunderbird portable.
then I copy them to a local imap server.
finally, I have gmail synch the files from my computer and tag them as SMS.
So I can search through them on-the-go.

after I do this, I can archive them in myPhone. One feature myphone needs is something like "archive all by last 5 txt from each conversation" that would rule.