Hanging Capital

Try disabling plugins and check whether the problem persists. I suppose the problem is only within the dashboard?

Don’t know if it will solve the freezing problem, but you could remove the first capital styling and see if that helps. That code is in the erudite.css file starting on lines 146:

body.single .entry-content > p:first-child:first-letter, .first-post .entry-content > p:first-child:first-letter {
    font-size: 4.5em;
    line-height: 0.65em;
}
.entry-content > p:first-child:first-letter {
    background: url("../images/stripes.png") repeat scroll 0 0 #555555;
    color: #FFFFFF;
    float: left;
    font-size: 3em;
    line-height: 0.7em;
    margin: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;
    padding: 0.1em;
}

You might also try another browser and/or computer in case that has anything to do with it.

How do I correctly get rid of the hanging capital without screwing things up?

A cheap hack is to skip the first line of a post and the hanging cap won’t be used. It’ll create a larger gap between the header and the text but I doubt many readers will notice it.

Or you can get rid of it entirely by commenting out these lines from the erudite.css file:

body.single .entry-content > p:first-child:first-letter, .first-post .entry-content > p:first-child:first-letter {font-size:4.5em; line-height:.65em;}
.entry-content > p:first-child:first-letter {font-size:3em; float:left; background:#555 url(../images/stripes.png) repeat; color:#fff; margin:.05em .1em\
0 0; padding: .1em ; line-height:.7em;}
body.webkit.set-in-hoeflertext .entry-content > p:first-child:first-letter {padding:.2em .1em 0;}

But then you won’t be able to use it ever. If you want some elegant solution to turn it on or off as needed, then I have no idea. Well some idea but I don’t know enough to implement it.