For me this seems to be tied with using https (and KB SSL Enforcer): with encryption, switching folder views freezes Reader for up to a minute. When I switch to plain http, everything works as fluently as it used to just a week ago. I’m using Chromium 11.0.696.65 (84435) in Ubuntu 10.04.

I marked the answer above as unhelpful, because the issue raised in the title of the question went unanswered by it: English not showing up in the preferences, i.e. the language selection dropdown menu didn’t have English. I was able to fix this by unselecting Google and Google Services from HTTPS Everywhere’s settings, but then again wasn’t able to reproduce it after re-enabling them, so I’m still not sure whether HTTPS Everywhere was the root cause.