Arggghhhh, I'm French and I bought a GB A600 (so with a QWERTY keyboard ... well not a big problem)
For CF, I test few brands, and I only use Sandisk (seems that Transcend works also).
I'm using a generic (From Amazon), CF PCMCIA adapter.
So, what's the brand of you CF ? If you can, by some Sandisk (I'm using 8 Go). I know (from Furia developer) that some CF are very slow to start and it can be an issue (Internal or external usage)