User 2006, my experience is just the opposite to yours, my box is whisper quiet. The only noise I can hear is a
very faint hard drive sound, and that is only when I put my ear close to the box and have the TV on mute.
The reasons for the "slow" menus is aparently when you change channels it has to delete the cache that it would need to pause live TV, and then switch it to the next channel. I find the "Red Button" menu a tad slow, compaired to my built in freevew on the TV, and it isn't as crisp, but since I don't use the red button a lot, it doesn't bother me.
I would get in touch with CS and complain about the noise, it should not be that bad.
One question for the experts, when I playback a recording and I stop it (say) half way through wanting to watch the rest later, can I resume from where I stopped watching?, mine seems to go back to the beggining.
Otherwise I am delighted with the system. :
Gordon.