May have to hard reset Hero....some advice/help?

[ToxicToastKatz]

OK, so I've come to the realization that I may have to hard reset this puppy! I REALLY don't want to, but as of late, this thing has been running like a DOG!! Everything runs slow. The Market often tells me there is a network problem when I'm connected to my work's WiFi (although, there is a good chance it is the actual WiFi that is the issue), The Market takes forever to load My Downloads, apps take a while to load, the phone takes a good 5 seconds to react after being asleep for any amount of time, the keyboard is laggy (moreso than before), Handscent's pop up notification moves at an absolute crawl and just today, I noticed that the phone is up 100% of the time. Granted, the awake time, I could care less about because my battery doesn't seem to be suffering as of yet, so if it sleeps or not bothers me not. I'm sure it's some app that's reeking havoc on the system, so I'll probably end up deleting one by one to see if that's the issue, but I'll probably just end up hard resetting and starting new. I haven't been pushed to the rooting route yet, as I'm not really sure I want to do that as of now. My question to the community are as follows:

1. Prior to hard resetting, what information needs to be backed up? Let me restate that, I know contacts/calendar/mail are all backed up in the Google Cloud as well as my company's Exchange Server, so I'm not worried about that. I use SMS Backup, so all of my text messages are stored in my Gmail account and I don't even have texts on my phone. I'm looking for some of the less obvious things that may be stored on the phone that could be overlooked while backing up, and I won't end up realizing until after I've wiped the phone (i.e. photos, app information, etc.?).

2. Since I'm not rooted, I don't think there is a way to get a screen capture of my scenes so that I can set them up similar to the way they are now. Am I incorrect in thinking this? If there is no way to do this, what are some methods people have used to record what their screens look like? I was thinking of just snapping actual photos using a camera to take pictures of the screens.

3. Can anyone else think of why all of a sudden the phone is acting up? Prior to this, the phone has been pretty stable. It actually has been soft resetting w/o powering down the past few days (almost like SenseUI is crashing and restarting) and today it actually did a full soft reset reboot all by itself. Google Voice Force Closed a few times today as well. I have installed a few things over the past week and uninstalled most programs, but things that I have installed and kept on the phone since I've noticed these issues are:

App Usage Manager
AppManager
Gigbox
Lookout Mobile Security
Midomi
Nesoid
Rhapsody (Beta)
Spare Parts
SMS Backup

Any insight is always appreciated.