The dot crawl and all the other bad things can be a combination of the sets scaler and the quality of the video your feeding it, better scaller/electronics can clean that up some, but bad video is bad video if they dont do a decent job of encoding. I notice it really bad on my Panasonic dvd recorder when I crank down the bitrate to get more on a disk. Some sets will mask it better so do some shopping and pick a good one. My Toshiba 34hfx84 does pretty well, especially with analog stuff that it upconverts to 1080i but it still has some artifacts, as said some channles are worse then others. True HD through it is breathtaking but I notice a bit of artifacts if I'm right on top of the set, probably the HDtuner I'm using. Signal will cuase dropouts and pixelisation when it gets weak enough or there is a lot of multipath interference, so yes make sure you have good quality coax and splitters or that could be part of your problem too.