I think the speed up is to be credited to njaard and etotheipi work on optimizing the DB. As for the transactions, did you pick show all wallets in the drop down combo box? Some people have it defaulted to "my wallet" and that won't show you transactions for any wallet that you didn't mark as yours.
No idea. I was so shocked I could still move around in the application after transaction scanning was complete, I didn't really spend any time troubleshooting. After about 5 seconds of clicking on things and having them react I shut down and removed the wallet, added others and restarted. It very well may have been user error.