thanks!
i ended up wiping out the old OS and installing the new OS mentioned in the other thread of this forum. I had to re-install twice before it cleared everything and seems to work. Thank goodness I had made a backup of my files just earlier today!
Anyway, things seem to work ok for now. Keeping my fingers crossed.
I figured out it was the games created by Zgroup mobile from
http://www.midlet.org/
that were crashing my 7100t.
Just a warning to anyone else out there....