system refresh

[John Dangler]

I'm thinking of refreshing the install of my Ubuntu desktop.  I've
fooled with loading and unloading so many different apps that I've
pretty well trashed my setup, and, although I use this box every day, I
figure with a tarball backup of my home directory (and a tarball of the
entire system), I can get back what I need, which is essentially just
mail (critical), and possibly my keyring and dev files...

I have the Dapper cd, and I know I want the gnome desktop and OO.o (I've
been tempted to go to KDE a few times, but have never taken the plunge,
since I'm used to gnome), but I know that I want to add - 

NVIDIA (this is critical to get X to start at all...

vmware-server (for a Win part)

Some graphics pkgs - 
Gimp, Blender, Inkscape,  Scribus

Internet Tools - Skype/Wengo (I need to try this out)
gaim, bmon, ethereal, firefox (with dev plugins)

flash-player9, gxine

A development environment consisting of Eclipse, Ruby/Rails, Sun Java
JRE (I'll need SE and Beans for school), mySQL, and Apache/Lighttpd
(never could get lighttpd to run a rails app).

I have a webcam (Logitech Pro 3000) with audio/video, but have never
gotten that to work...

I have a Lexmark 6500 all-in-one printer (but have never gotten that to
work, either).

Other apps - rosegarden (the repo versions are waaay old, so I'd like to
produce the .deb file for this one and put it to the repo folks to
include, although I know it needs a newer version of cmake than what's
in the repo's at this moment.)

Since mail is the critical piece here, can I reinstall Ubuntu on the
system, and just restore my .evo directory?

Also, any suggestions on other apps would be cool.  I've tried a good
number of them, some of which I'll re install later, but for the moment,
I just want to refresh the system install and basic apps that I know
I'll need.