Absolutely do not do any "under construction" or Alpha/Beta ROMs, unless you would consider yourself an expert android user. I wouldn't even think about doing a ROM until it's been tested by 'normal' users and publicly released to everyone. Velocity, Raptor and Punisher were thoroughly tested before let out of the cage.
The simplest way to test ROMs is to make a Nandroid backup of everything. Then, you can do whatever you want to the poor thing and revert right back with Nandroid restore and the phone will be 100% like it was before you messed with it.
Thanks for that wise advice!

I am sure once I install a custom ROM for the first time it will seem much easier, just like rooting did using Z4root.
I have been making backups since rooting, with both ClockworkMod Recovery and starting today with Titanium Backup. I also periodically fully copy both SD card partitions to a storage folder on a PC running Ubuntu 10.10. So I have that covered pretty well. If things go bad, I have more than one choice of dates to fall back to. I recently had a problem with the OEM SD card and having those backups saved me a lot of grief. They also made upgrading to my current larger SD card easy.
--Originally Posted by
Crash89
Try adfree android from the market. Have to be rooted.--
I'd like to say thanks again to Crash89 for the above suggestion. I installed adfree android from the Market and it seems to have made all the lag problems in Angry Birds go away. I only rarely see any sign of a brief lag now, and most of the time it plays smoothly. Now my biggest *problem* is that this game is so darned addictive!!

But I wanted to give his suggestion "a thorough test" so that certainly justifies my having done nothing but play the game for the past 3 hours.
One of the down sides to forums is that information evolves. Recommended procedures and advice will change over time and we rarely go back to amend advice we posted in the past. Sometimes this can make researching how to do something a bit confusing. I think I would like to try the Velocity ROM, but I am still reading threads to figure out the currently recommended way to acquire and install it.
At some point it was mentioned that it can be done from within ClockworkMod Recovery, but I see the most recent posts in the thread announcing Velocity 0.4's release have a URL to download it directly I guess. So I'll look into which way it can be done with the current version. I do like the idea of it's automatically restoring a backup when installed, so you get all your bits back in order and don't have to reinstall all the apps and such.
Thanks for the help!!