Sorry everyone. I got my storm on the 21st and this was one of the first things I did to speed it up. I'm one of the lucky ones who have a relatively problem free unit. Anyway, when I tried this I immediately found the device to speed up considerably. I was going to post a thread about it but I apparently forgot. My bad.
Since then I've created several folders on the home screen and have organized icons accordingly so that my home screen has less than 12 icons now. Works nice.