Am experiencing symptoms I call 'Idle Stall'.

System:
2 SB2s, almost always sync'd
Wireless connection to D-Link 624, 802.11g, 70-95% signal
Athlon 2400, 1GB RAM, 400GB SATA HDD
WinXP SP2
35,000 track library  98%MP3, 2%FLAC

stall usually occurs on first use after some idle time
display is normal and responsive up to certain points
most noticable stall on browsing to "new music"
as soon as right arrow is hit, display remains stuck
sometimes for minutes at a time
once it responds the first time, it is OK afterwards
similar issues on browse by artist, not as severe
'waking' the system via web interface also brings it out of the stall
occurs even when only ~50% of physical RAM is assigned

Theory:
even though sufficient physical resources are available, the application is
getting into something of an idle state.  
may be memory swapping of some sort
may be OS memory issue (tunable via OS settings?)
(mozilla used to do a similar thing on Win)
may be db connections timing out 

Workaround:
i've set up an AT (like chron) job at 30min frequency 
calls wget to fetch this URL:
http://[username]:[password]@slimserver.mydomain.org:9000/browsedb.html?hierarchy=age,track&level=0&player=00%3A04%3A20%3A05%3Aac%3A69
this remediates the problem for now.