Internal memory

[elefntkpr]

I rooted my phone a while back, then applied the optimazation zip. After running that for a while I found the New Years release of Fresh Rom so I took the plunge. Great Rom btw. Well, being the nerd I am, I've installed and removed apps a thousand times, fiddled with this and that, etc...and started to notice the phone acting a bit silly. I saw that the phone was reporting 44mb free internal storage so I decided to hard reset and start from scratch. A bit off topic here but let me say that this is the fastest I've ever reset a smart phone...beats WM hands down. After the reset, and after installing and setting up all apps and accounts from before I noticed i had 80mb of internal memory available. So I went fishin'. I found alot of older threads about ther BT memory leak but I don't use BT. I also found issues regarding app cache but most post seemed to indicate this was fixed with the last update. Some suggested clearing the cache manually but doing so (at least with mail app) removed your account settings as well...don't want to do that.
My questions are did they actually fix the cache issue? Is there a structured way to clear the cache manually? Does my phone have down syndrome?

Thanks

John