I think the sound issue is a problem with Safari's offline cache. I've heard from other users if you remove all sound files from offline.appcache it fixes it - but then that will break the offline support. We can't easily just do that automatically, because the same file is used for all browsers, so it would break offline support completely on all platforms. So we'd prefer to leave that as a tweak for users to make themselves if they choose to.
The home button not working and needing a hard reset is definitely an iOS bug, and a hard reset usually indicates a kernel or driver level fault. It's not at all obvious how to even begin working around an issue like that, and it may not even be possible. I think the best approach is just to keep complaining to Apple and hope that they pay attention after enough people report it. I'm sure it would affect lots of other people...