Well, you probably won't find a lot of people exclaiming TiVo's virtues any more. Most PVRs have come a long way since they first started eating TiVo's lunch.

That said, none of the problems you describe have existed on any of my TiVos back to when they were first launched.

Taking a quick look at the Virgin Media web site, it looks like the one you have has the UI of the US TiVo Premiere, which hasn't gotten good reviews, though mostly due to underpowered hardware rather than actual problems like you're describing. However, part of the complaints have been about the new UI being clumsy. It's the first real UI update since TiVo launched, and it sounds like it didn't go all that well.

Basically what I'm saying is that TiVo built up a lot of good will by having a really robust, well made device, then squandered that through glacial updates and a poor version 2.