But has anyone else had show stopper issues other than low rate mp3 issues...

As was mentioned in another posting and based on my experience it seems the way to go is to load around 6 to 10 albums at a time. I tried an upgrade on my ver2.00 player with over 6000 tracks and I could not get it to function without puking every once and a while. I also tried a new 80gig hdd and loaded the builder software then the alpha player software and dragged and dropped about 6,900 tunes and discovered that it would puke after a small number of albums.

Loading 6-10 albums at a time seems to work (although I do get errors every once and a while when restarting the player after a sync it seems that I have to switch between jemplode and emplode to get things loaded properly.

Crossfading rocks and I like the long press for seek when using the tuner.