Sorry, I was a bit inaccurate on that part. The artist link button never turns white on my NW-A1000 either. It's the other controls that are sometimes white now. Before the update pressing the artist link button always resulted in ALL the controls backlight to turn orange. Now it only turns orange sometimes. No idea what it's supposed to mean.
I don't use WMA, but upgraded nevertheless. My NW-A1000 seems to be a bit faster and responsive with the new firmware update. However the behaviour of the orange light when pressing the "artist link" button, has changed. Sometimes it's white instead of orange... doesn't make sense to me at the moment. Anyone got any idea about that?
You can disable automatic id tag editing in the options. I am using my NW-A1000 for 3 weeks now on a daily basis, and absolutely love it. CONNECT is a bit of a CPU hog, but it was stable up to now, so no issues here.