Only time mPod/mPad have locked up with me is when BDP was turned off or power was recycled. I've never had an issue though. Does anyone have an unusually large library?
A quicker way to restart mPod/mPad is to kill the background task: just double click the home button so that the list of running apps appear, hold down on the app until the "-" icon appears and you can close mPod/mPad. This is close to the same way as deleting an app, so don't click the icon if the "x" appears, which means you didn't double click correctly.
The only complaint I have with mPod/mPad is the 180 seconds it takes to redownload the mpd database to the phone.
Jim