OK I feel a little better now that i know i am not alone on that. I don't get why it still charges a tx fee for a rejected tx..
I would do as lukemarshall suggested and dumpprivkey, exit the wallet program, rename the wallet.dat (wallet-old.dat works for me), start the wallet again to generate a new wallet, then importprivkey.
and wait an hour or so for the wallet to rescan for missing transactions on the 'new' address.
I was messing with it last night, and reduced the size of my wallet.dat file by 8K, and got rid of the studdering. haven't tried transfers yet