Just a quick warning to those experiencing the SD problem (and perhaps just a good idea to all)
Back up your SD card to your computer.
I have been experiencing the 8+ second delays on my 1gb Kingston miniSD.
Then while using PIE last night I tried to open a web page and every thing slowed way down to the point where I couldn't even turn off the device. So I did a soft reset. Oddly enough when it booted back up it asked me to align the screen as though it was a hard reset, then I went through the usual 1st boot up screens and then the today screen looked as though it too had done a hard reset.
I tried to run a program (don't remember which one) and it returned an error about finding the file. So I opened File Explorer and there were lots of extra folders and files many of which had HTML type names like a folder called "<a href=" and crazy stuff like that. So I did a hard reset and everything worked normally. Except for when I tried to use the SD card. There were corrupt files on it too. I put it in my PC's card reader and was able to recover about half the files on it, the rest contained bad data.