Has anyone experienced a general slow-down in the performance of their Pearl as they install more and more software? The reason I ask is because I bought a Pearl about a week ago and set it up with the O2 OS, Opera mini and Opera beta, a few games and some pics for the background. I didn't really notice much of a difference in performance. HOWEVER, I returned that phone so I could get a free one through Amazon. The Amazon phone arrived yesterday, and using it straight out of the box it seems lightning fast compared to my old one. For instance, I run the Today Plus theme. On the old one, when I hit the MENU key from the home screen, there was a noticeable delay in displaying all of the applications/options. On this new phone, it's darn near instantaneous. So far I have only installed Spider Solitaire from Magmic. Otherwise it is clean, with the TMO OS. So, I'm wondering - did I load up the old Pearl so much that it hurt its performance? Anyone experience this? Is there a critical mass data load point after which performance begins to slow?

I know if you leave them running in the background....
but just loading them onto the device shouldn't do that much.

is there a way to check what programs are running in the background? i generally choose "close" or "exit" when leaving an app... i assumed this would stop the program from running in the background, but i know that other mobile OSs, like PocketPC, have had issues where "close" doesn't really mean "exit."

ALT + the escape key will let you scroll thru the open apps

but yeah, close or exit from the menu is the only way I know to shut off most programs. I was thinking you might be just escaping, shouldn't assume anything, sorry.