Thank you for your input regarding CataBlog. I appreciate the time and effort everyone takes to help make CataBlog a better plugin. It would seem you had two problems to report.
1. If the category name is just the right length then you can't delete it.
2. Catalog list in Admin takes too long to render 700 items
Now I haven't had a chance to fix the category name blocking the delete link issue since I have been concentrating on other features and bugs. A fix most likely will be integrated into the upcoming 1.2 version release, since it should be relatively easy to fix.
As far as the version 1.1.7 being much slower then version 1.1 at displaying 700 catalog items, I am not surprised. 1.1.7 was a beta release and low and behold had some pretty nasty bugs. One such bug was that WordPress was individually fetching each item's categories, making a list of 700 items require over 700 database queries. Very very bad, got that one fixed in 1.1.8 which was just released.
In an effort to make the Admin catalog list load faster I also incorporated some JavaScript to lazy load the thumbnail images. Instead of loading all images when the page is loaded it only loads the images that are visible. This script was doing a lot of calculation when you scrolled the browser window, I fixed this by caching the list of images to lazy load into one array and manipulating that array directly. This dramatically reduced the amount of memory the page required and made scrolling seem smoother to me.
All in all, if you are adventurous, I would look into possibly installing CataBlog 1.1.8, otherwise wait for the upcoming new stable release.