It has been established previously that thermal switching in high density magnetic media causes a significant time dependence of the coercivity at least for times > 10(-8) s, Here, the classical Arrhenius-Neel model assuming coherent rotation is applied to systems with distributions in volume, anisotropy and orientation and the numerical results for the time dependent remanent coercivity H-CR(t), the viscosity SR, and the irreversible susceptibility, chi(IRR) compared to new experimental data on CrO2 particulate tapes with varying orientation. The results for an anisotropy distribution are significantly different from a volume distribution and are in better agreement with the data. All distributions produce Sharrock type behavior for H-CR(t), regardless of the distribution width. The model predicts that increasing the orientation distribution width will have very little effect on the fractional time dependence of N-CR, in agreement with experiment which showed that S-R/chi(IRR) and HCR(t) were essentially independent of orientation. Finally, the direct connection between S-R/chi(IRR) and N-CR(t) is confirmed theoretically and experimentally.