If you guys are like me and don't really care about the text messages you've sent and received, here's what I would suggest.
Get Astro file manager. Go to its app backup tool, and backup all of your apps (it probably won't be able to backup paid apps). Now, there is a way to make the phone backup and sync you settings for things like wifi networks to the cloud. Unfortunately, the only way I've found to do this comes when initializing the phone's setup, like after a factory reset. Which is a shame, because my sales rep at the VZW didn't check that box, and because what I'm going to tell you to do next is..
A factory reset. Yeah, your settings like wifi networks will disappear, and you'll lose some application data like your battery widget's calibration. Luckily, after this factory reset, you can tell it to make sure to back these things up. Alternately, you can download an app from the market like MyBackup.
Anyways, the real things we're looking for here are a fresh start, and a mass culling of your accumulated apps. There's a good chance the Market has already downloaded and installed your paid apps at this point, and now's a good time to go check. If they haven't, they still have kept track of those bought apps. Download those and Astro File Manager again. Mess around with some things, flick the screens a bit. Things should feel around 0.01-0.1 seconds faster. Go to Astro, and install the apps from the backup that you really, really use on a regular basis, like the ones that you know should be on your home screens. Aim for reinstalling around 1 out of 4 apps. Keep it like this for a while, mess around with it. Reset up your homescreens, add some widgets. If everything's working just as fluidly, consider reinstalling a few more apps. Do this slowly and in chunks.
Right about now you'll have realized that the Market app isn't keeping track of what needs to be updated, because it's playing dumb about the apps you installed from backup. Now chances are this isn't a huge deal right away, probably only a handful of them have updates, if any at all, and they're probably minor bug fixes. But wait, minor bugs might be what's causing such an occasional problem.
Get an app called aTrackDog. Now, it won't automatically update everything with one click. But it will stop you from having to remember or write down a list of all those free apps and go searching for them. It connects to its own version tracker, and if a version number of an app you have installed isn't what it thinks the latest is, with a couple of clicks you can be at the Download button in the Market app, for that app.
Now again, this might be a fairly long process for your patience, so if you can live with an occasional error, or if you think you know the one or two apps that just feel intuitively like they're the problem children, just get rid of those and forget it.
But, if you're like me and ended up on the northend of 190 apps because you like to tinker, then tinkering some more to solve the problem is a win-win.
If you can isolate a particular action that causes a bug, you can then isolate what particular app is causing that action to be buggy. But that's where my patience went out too, especially since it was things that wasn't happening consecutively. After a mass culling, my phone runs hiccup and stutter free. And if I'm ever in that one situation that I downloaded a particular, extraneous app for, I know it's sitting there on my SD.