HTC Touch Pro (CDMA)

Hi, I just received an HTC Touch Pro from Sprint yesterday, let it charge overnight, and after several hours on chat and in a Sprint store, finally got it activated this afternoon -- may have had something to do with my really old plan and/or suspending service when I lost my previous phone. I had a Sanyo 4700 for the past seven years, and it wasn't much, but what little it did, it did 99.9999% reliably (I think I only did a reset on it twice in the entire seven years). But I digress.

Once I got the Touch Pro activated, I spent the rest of today fooling around with the phone in a good faith effort to learn how to use the interface so that I can make a truly informed decision whether to keep it or look elsewhere.

Right now, the biggest problem is the touch screen. And it's bad enough to make me seriously think about returning it. It worked great for a while, but then around dinner when I was trying to add a photo of my mom to the contact I created for her, it ignored the tap on the add picture field. It ignored it over and over again. It ignored taps on all of the other fields as well. I tried closing the contacts, closing all the other programs in the quick list, putting it into standby with the power switch and then waking it up again, and then finally it gave me the list of my pictures ironically after I made an accidental tap to the left of the field. It took me by surprise because it did not ever demonstrate any calibration problems for any of the dozens of other taps I've done to that point.

So I plugged it in to charge for a while and went off to clean up the kitchen and watch yesterday's BSG and then I picked it back up and started using Opera. It was working great for a while. And then, again, it started ignoring more and more gestures (taps, swipes, drags), until Opera was completely and utterly unresponsive. Ultimately I had to hit the home key and shut Opera down from the quick list.

So now I find myself reflecting back when I first turned it on this morning, and I recall that it didn't really respond each time I tapped (with my finger, I admit) during the calibration phase. And when I brought it into the Sprint store and the guy decided he had to do a hard reset, he used the stylus to calibrate, but even then he had to tap the crosshair a few times to get it to respond.

I guess maybe I'm spoiled, because I have an HP Pavilion notebook, and the cat pad on it is always so responsive, even to the lightest of touches.

So, is there something I can do to solve this problem? Or do I have a flaky touch screen? Maybe a flaky driver? Or does WM6.1 suffer from some kind of memory leak and just needs to be restarted every few hours? Are my friends with iPhones right that WM is just going to make my life miserable?