Dropping 2.5 MB in an hour is one thing, but starting out at only 8.8MB, well, dayum!, what do you have loaded on that thing? Starting at 8.8 doesn't give you any wiggle room.
I have 74 home page icons. Is this overkill? I kind of got carried away with the one touch access.
How many are acceptable. After I made some changes I now started with 9.5.
did you actually install all that VZW crap? or are they still just the launchers?
I installed VZW Tones for ringbacks, Song ID,VCAST Music & My Verizon were pushed by Verizon along with VCAST Video, but I didnt install that. Bing was pushed as well. So was Slacker, I had Pandora first but didnt need to internet radios.
The new RIM theme builder (Plazmic replacement) was just released. It does some cool things like animated menus and fixes the white bar problems.
It isn't that difficult to make your own theme. There is an open source thread on the Storm themes forum where you can download some sample files to use as the basis for your custom theme.
I was running a very simple theme I'd thrown together before installing 5.0 and was leaking lots of memory. (I run several memory-intensive apps like Google Voice, but still boot at 38 or so.) After opening the theme in the new theme builder app and tweaking a few things, memory is stable for me.