Ah, sorry for not updating this thread. The problem finally got fixed. It was really a two part solution.
1) There was something definitely wrong with my Cruz. It acted much like a computer would if it had a bad piece of RAM. And it crashed all the time, with everything. As I mentioned earlier my wife's seemed to run as well as expected, even if I was running it. So I knew it wasn't me. I took it back to Radio Shack and even though it was outside their return window by a few days they returned it and gave me another one. And it worked as well as my wife's.
2) I was still not happy with the tablet, I rooted it, I overclocked the processor, put a new operating system on it, etc... And bottom line, no matter what I did to it, it was still a cheap tablet. So the second part of the solution was to buy two Acer A500's from Walmart which I should have done in the first place and not been so cheap. Now, life is good. We have two good tablets and the kids have two tablets that will function as readers at least. Everyone is happy for today.
