[furious]

Another update:

I decided to give it another go yesterday - after cumulatively spending hours and hours restarting, manually factory resetting the device again and again over the previous days.

And at last I was able to set up the device. For the first time the touchscreen worked long enough for me to choose the language, wifi password, email, etc, etc.

And now I have a seemingly working device, with no touchscreen freeze, that's fast and responsive as you would expect.

The difference is, it's on software version 4.30.18838a from 10/30/21.

I'm almost certain the 4.34 - dot something, something - update that mine got now a month ago completely crippled my device and was the reason for my touchscreen to repeatedly freeze and not accept any input every time I opened it.

My wifi is off and I have my sync off (hopefully that ensures it doesn't update itself automatically when I inevitably reconnect my wifi).

And I've not loaded any books on it just yet. I'll be keeping an eye on it for the next few days to see how it fares.

Two days are not enough to draw any conclusion but the signs are good.