Refreshing Your Media lasts for a really long time

I usually like to keep all my favorite songs on the card and use the interal memory for audiobooks and new albums.  Every time I upload something new to the internal memory, it has to go through the  whole refresh thing for the whole system, and mine takes around 45-55 minutes for some reason.

I’ve got a 16gb card with about 14 gb full, about 3,000 MP3s, all from 128-192 bit rate with clean tags.  I’ve tried a copy of the music with all of the extra tag information stripped down to just the title, artist, and album, removing everything else including the artwork and even the year and track numbers, but it still takes just about as long.

I’ve tried it on a couple of different zips, and it seems to have the same refresh rate on all of them.  I got a Zip Sport and used the same loaded card on there and it’s usually good within a few minutes, so I don’t think the card is bad.   However, the Sport is so buggy in pretty much every other way (cuts off album and band names, plays albums and audiobooks out of order, 2000 song database limit etc.) that I’d like to go back to by Zip if possible.  Any non-tag related issues anyone can think of?  Any non-Rockbox solutions?

Thanks