Hey there nghthawk. Haven't seen you around in a while. Have you seen this thread about the "sleep of death" problem?
http://forum.androidcentral.com/ver...-trouble-sleep-death-eb01-superclean-2-x.html
It's a bit of a drawn out process, but people are reporting success with it getting rid of SOD.
As far as the email sync, many of us have found that to be a problem with the stock email program not the ROM. A lot of people, myself included, have switched to K-9 mail and I have had no problems since. Polls and syncs email much more regularly.
Haven't seen the problem you are describing. Sounds like something related to the instant function where Google starts searching for results as you are typing. Just below the search window, turn off instant if it is on and see if that is what is happening. Other than that I will play around with it a bit to see what you are describing. Is this with the stock browser or another browser like Dolphin or Firefox?
For battery life have you tried one of the new EC10 based kernels that have been released in the past two weeks? They are great on battery life because they are undervolted. You can find them in post # 4 of Jaekar99's thread
HERE