About your Axim slowing to a crawl if you don't reinstall it every month -- are you using PPC 2003? If so, I was having a similar problem myself 'cause there is a bug in PPC 2003 that causes extra entries to be added to the notification queue every time you do a soft reset. Those add up and eventually your Axim slows to a crawl. There's no official fix yet but here's a link to a freeware utility that will automatically remove the extra entries upon each soft reset... it's also got some more detailed info about the bug:
http://www.scarybearsoftware.com/ppc_cn_overview.html