Greetings!

So, after cleaning out the drives with an FSCK, I can continue... Also, I have a clone player (working on LabRat, clone is Archive) that I can use to get comparisons and timings after the fact. They are (well, were) in perfect rsync.

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Empeg State:
Version 2.0 Final, Developer, Hijack 344
2 x 80GB Hard Drives (160GB nominal, 149GB useable)
27066 Tracks (as defined by soup view in emplode)
6.4 GB Free (as defined by status bar in emplode)
73EF <29679 Decimal> Highest FID # (via serial port examination, leaving off last digit)

Before:
Power-on time = 21 seconds : (timed from power applied by pushing into dock until standby mode entered)
Power-on time = 16.2 seconds : (using "time player" from shell, and quitting player as soon as possible)
Load player into emplode = 7 minutes 46 seconds : (using serial connect - slower, but known constant transfer rate)
Sync = infinity * : (emplode using serial connect - deleted one song from one playlist)
Database Rebuild = 21 minutes 8 seconds : (going into shell, setting drives read/write and running the player application to rebuild database files)
FSCK Time = 61 minutes 2 seconds : (time fsck -fay /drive0, assuming clean drive to begin with)

During:
fidsift.sh = less than 1 hour (time ./fidsift.sh) - Sorry. The first time around, the time command did not return a value to me. My PC went into a full system virus scan, and my hyperterm results became choppy. So, trusting that I would see useful results, I wandered away... The command succeeded, though.

After:
Power-on time = 23 seconds : (timed from power applied by pushing into dock until standby mode entered)
Power-on time = 19.7 seconds : (using "time player" from shell, and quitting player as soon as possible)
Load player into emplode = 7 minutes 48 seconds : (using serial connect - slower, but known constant transfer rate)
Sync = infinity * : (emplode using serial connect - deleted one song from one playlist)
Database Rebuild = 6 minutes 52 seconds : (going into shell, setting drives read/write and running the player application to rebuild database files)
FSCK Time = 60 minutes 12 seconds : (time fsck -fay /drive0, assuming clean drive to begin with)

* infinity - my players FID count seems to be giving emplode and database creation grief. I am able to upload the tracks with emplode, but further syncs seems to cause an error 0x8004003e from emplode. The "building databases" part of the sync goes by unnaturally fast, and then Emplode crashes during the "writing player configuration" phase, causing a Dr. Watson dump. The player just sits there with "Building music databases..." on the screen. After over 30 minutes passed, the building database phase appeared to complete, and the player application completed its load. Going in with a serial link, the /drive0/var directory has no database files. I will rebuild them by hand as above... After that rebuild, the player works normally, with all changes made from the sync in place. It is just an inconvenience. No other problems noticed yet from beyond beyond max-fid-count. See this thread for more information.

WOW!!! I did not expect to see that kind of improvement, given that I am so far out there with the FID count. Note: Since normal syncs do not work for me, I am probably a bad example for this... All times that involve human interaction (quitting player, watching the clock) are dependent on human response time, and are all +/- a second or two...