Should I fall back to 32 bit?

[benben]

Hi everyone!

I have a Pentium D pc and a few weeks ago I finally made the transition 
to Ubuntu Linux AMD64 version from Windows.

However, it also comes with a number of 64 bit incompatibility issues 
which to this date I am unable to solve. For example, the Intel graphics 
driver does not do any hardware acceleration, SCIM does not work on 
OpenOffice, I can't play a number of media such as flash and wmv.

I was forced to set up a vmware server on top of which runs a windows as 
backup.

So I decided maybe I should give 32 bit Linux a try. Perhaps that'd 
solve some of the problems. But on the other hand I am concerned about 
the performance impact it would bring.

So what would you guys say? Should I stay with AMD64 or switch to x86? 
To what scale would the performance impact be, and what things I shall 
be careful with?

Regards,
Ben