lol all my problems were caused by a bad microSD. wow, I don't know what to say. AWESOME.
btw, when I was looking to see what kind of microSD card to get, I found this forum:
SD Strange-results - or - How I learned to love CM7 on SD - xda-developers
seems like overwhelmingly the best cards for running android off it would be a SanDisk 8 or 16 GB Class 2!!! or class 4. And then test the random write/random read speed -- aim for something ABOVE 1 MB/s. aside from my bad microSD card being bad and corrupting everything, the random write/random read speeds were around .020 MB/s...