I noticed the error about joint 8 as well... i went looking in my outliner but couldn't find it, so ignored the error, loloops... as far as the rig is concerned, I don't really know what ik and fk handles and control curves even do, thi sis my first time rigging, there was no mention of freeze transformations in the tutorial :/

When I meant it freezes, I did mean the cursor lags.

What I did was go back to an un-rigged character and check the response times for moving it, they were good, and just kept adding a bit then checking. What I've narrowed it down to is binding the skin to the mesh and then altering some of the geometry. I would bind the skin, deform it, and notice holes appeared, so i put it back into bind pose and fixed the holes, while the skin was bound, which I beleive was the problem.

However, thanks a bunch for looking at it