Suddenly my Rezound hangs all the time

At first I thought my problems stemmed from an update with WidgetLocker. However, I uninstalled that and the problems persist.

Description of problem:
So I boot the device to the lock screen.
I unlock the phone and all I see is my background with the taskbar at the top. No icons. I can't interact with anything. After a few seconds the screen goes dim and times out. Even if I touch the screen to keep this from happening.

I hit the power button to turn the screen back on. No response. I wait 30 seconds or so and it turns back on. I am greeted with "xxxx process/program has stopped responding do you want to force quit, wait, or send a report" (whatever program happens to be up, doesn't seem to matter, all programs cause this to happen). If I hit force quit the program still hangs. If I hit "wait" the program starts working. This isn't a very repeatable event in that sometimes when I turn the screen back on instead of the "force quit" screen I get the background with taskbar.

While all this is going on I am still receiving status updates, emails, texts, etc. Sometimes I can get to the point where icons appear on my homescreen but if I tap a program's icon the screen just freezes.

I have Go Launcher installed but this happens in Go Launcher or Sense.

Any ideas what is going on? So far I've:
restarted
removed battery
restarted without back on
restarted without sim card in

No luck.

I tried "restore" but after being shown green arrows and an icon of the device I immediately get an icon of the device and a red exclamation in a triangle.

Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm trying to avoid a hard reset.

any recommendations for backing up? I can't really get to any apps right now.

What does RUU mean?

well

I ran the phone down to 0% battery. Restarted it and things seemed ok. But just now it is starting to hang again so going to back it up and run that RUU.

I tried the RUU but was told it could not communicate with my phone even though I had it plugged in via usb.

Instead of installing the RUU I installed one of the leaked ICS updates (official one for the rezound). Now it functions somewhat better. There is still often a long wait between pressing home while in an application and going to the home screen. Also while the screen is off, pressing the power button to turn the screen on I have to wait a good minute for the screen to come back on. Any idea what in the world is going on?

I did a factory reset to the ics rom.

How do I clear cache and what is dalvik.

I'm going to download one of the official rezound 2.3 update toms and flash it. If that doesn't work ill take it to a Verizon store and see what they can do. It is under warranty.

I've noticed that apps function fine the problem is getting to and from the home screens. It's then that the phone freezes up for a minute or so.

Ok was going to reset phone to 2.3 but got the main version error so going to try this trick to get the main version down to where I can "upgrade" to 2.3:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1467099

I can't get temp root to work so I can install superuser. Working on that now.

seems ICS leak has no temp root ability. I've reached the end of my road as I don't know where to go from here.