Sansa e200v1 sporadic freezing, some light debugging and callout to any 'elite'

[mdge]

Hey there, long time happy rockbox user here.

I've been enjoying rockbox on my e280 for the past half a decade (how time flies) and the past year I've had an increasing issue with inexplicable freezing while using my sansa.
It would seem to transcend releases the codebase, as I've a local archive of the versions I've installed throughout, and regressing back through them has made as little difference as grabbing the latest release available.

It tends to happen during attempted playback, halfway through a track, loading or reloading a track, and attempting to stop current playback of a track.
Instead of going to the next song in the playlist, rockbox freezes and hangs indefinitely, sometimes listening to keypresses now and then - as I'm sometimes able to change menus or adjust volume (uselessly without something playing) - and occasionally figuring itself out and jumping back to action, but usually I'm forced to suffocate the power button. Generally this has done the trick in the past, but this week I found that I can't even start playback of any tracks.

I have tried files both on an SD card and on the internal flash, to the same results. I've tried with the SD card removed, also with no effect (decreased storage aside).
I checked that my flash module is seated correctly; it is. There's no signs of physical or moisture damage to my unit that I can see with my naked eyes, and dust accumulation is negligible (got to love travel cases).
Poking around in the debug menu, with hung playback but a responsive interface, the buffering thread simply seems to never load. If I try to stop playback while it's hung on loading, the entire unit freezes and I get to drown it again.
Interestingly, sometimes the "powering off" screen will come up, but if I let it try and do it's thing, it'll sit and do nothing until the battery runs down, so I simply drown that anyways as well.
I've tried disabling as many 'extras' insofar as features go, playback settings are plain as I can make them, no xfade, equalizer, normalization, etc. The database is also disabled, directory cache is off, HID stuff is disabled, etc, etc.

As an aside, and a bit of a forgotten note, in the year before this started notably happening I discovered that enabling the equalizer would result in poorer interface responsiveness, with button presses being ignored or lagging to respond, and playback stuttering getting continually worse until EQ was disabled again, or the unit froze.

I suppose that about summarizes the extend of what I can tell, off the top of my head out the tips of my fingers, otherwise I'm stumped and sad to lose one of the best friends my pocket has ever had.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this isn't my first, second, or even third sansa, but it's the least "broken" failure I've had yet, so I'd like to fix it rather than replace it again - scarcity kind of helps this decision along too. Three OF failures before I found rockbox, fourth stolen, fifth dead screen, sixth stolen, seventh busted headphone jack...

I digress, if anybody has thoughts or ideas I'd love to get some feedback and input on this.

PS: I'm more or less uselessly bragging at this point, but I've had 7 or 8 other models of DAP that ran rockbox, none of them was quite as hardy as the e200 has been. My personal favorite is actually the Gigabeat S/F(it's an honest tie), but non-moving flash beats out spinning disks in the long run. Anybody got a cheap ZIF40<->microSD interface kicking about?