thanks guys---a lot of good info.
personal experience. facebook widget (the big one) tends to cause locks/no wakeups on the new kernel
swappy2 - a marked improvement, I have since changed my settings due to the great info from ya'll (plus I was looking at the info page and wasn't caching as much as I thought I would)
dropped my settings to
swap size - 64MB (down from 12
swappiness - 20 (down from 60)
recreate swap file - checked
reformat swap - unchecked
speed is still amazing!