That's good to know on the slot cover! I'm generally pretty gentle with my electronics (aside from jamming wrong sized cards into the slot hahaha), so hopefully that won't be an issue.
What's funny is the 512mb card that's giving me issues is a clean formatted card. My 2gig mini-SD that works is the one i pulled right out of my MDA (running WinMobile 5), and it cataloged and worked fine! Maybe I'll just start loading up my 2gig and swapping between phone and reader