Slowest Disc player I have ever seen

I bought this player for both movies and as a CD player. I have it connected via HDMI to a 720P DLP rear projector and coax to a fairly high end audio system.
The picture and sound quality are both quite good (not using the internal DACS anyhow) but it is unbelievably slow. It takes forever to power up, load a disk or even change tracks.
It is also not very reliable at playback, frequently crashing (Requiring that the power source be removed to recover) doesn't play some audio disks, and suffers from occasional dropouts on audio and freeze frames on movies.
I have updated to the most recent firmware (3.0 I think) This did help with some disks and slightly improved the disc load speed but is still not acceptable.
If it is only used for movies the performance is not as big of an issue. Since you are only loading once and typically not changing chapters you don't notice it as much.
I do like the ability to change audio format while playing. I generally listen to the 2 channel PCM audio for most music dvds but like to be able to try the 5.1 format without popping out the menu to change it.