1 - Search by whatever is case sensitive - "Belle and Sebastian" and "Belle And Sebastian" are treated as two different artists. Since I can only type case insensitive letters when I'm searching, is there really any reason for this?

Now that you've worded it so clearly and concisely, I think this one should be in Bug Reports.

I've worked around it myself by discovering these instances and fixing my tags. But you're right, in the case of Search by Artist, it doesn't make sense to separate them by case.

3 - I renamed a playlist and did a sync. It took ages reading back the database. Why does it need to do this when the changes are so simple?

There should be a fairly short pause for it to rebuild the database and reload it. However, I don't know what you define as "ages". There has been a bug reported by other users where there's a long pause during synchs- about 5 minutes in one report. This is a bug or some other problem and isn't the intended behavior (i.e., it doesn't happen on mine). See if you can find one of these threads and add your report to it.

4 - After a sync I'd like the window to return to the way I left it. Instead, I have to click 'close' on the sync window, then the empeg-car shrinks down and I have to click '+' to reopen it and repeat until I get back to where I was.

I don't understand what you're describing here. On my system, the window never moves (unless I move it) and it behaves itself completely the whole time. Can you reproduce this problem and give us more specific details?

___________
Tony Fabris