I was playing arond with the settings on my camera yesterday and made a discovery that I probably would have made had I not been such a "man" and read the manual.
The E500 will shoot continuous in "sport mode" to the capacity of the card if you back the resolution down to HQ (possibly SHQ as well) form .raw. In Raw it will only shoot 4 shots at 2.5 fps but if you need to capture a long series (race crach... finish line ... explosion of birds taking off from a lake...etc) having it set to HQ will give you that capability.
Next time I think I will read the manual and save myself a year of complaining. =)