downgrade, fresh install, or update drivers?

[Steven Christopher Talbot]

I recently upgraded from 6.10 Edgy Eft to 8.04 Hardy Heron.  I was 
attempting to download Netbeans 6.1 from sun, but my system freezes 
mid-download.

I have attempted this several times, always with the same result, and 
the only solution is a hard reboot.

I upgraded in order to take advantage of the presense of "ndiswrapper" 
in Hardy Heron, in order that my windows driver for the WMP54G Linksys 
Wireless-G PCI Adapter would function in Ubuntu.  It does, so I now 
have a wireless internet connection, but now I have the download 
freeze problem.

I've noticed that there are some screen resolution problems (dragging 
a window off to the right of the screen erases pixels on the left side 
of the screen, ala asteriods), so I was wondering if perhaps there 
might be a graphics driver issue.  However, toggling "System-
>Administration->Hardware Drivers" to use the nVidia proprietary 
driver yielded no difference in "freeze" behavior.  Therefore, I'm 
guessing that something else might be involved?

Any suggestions?

Dell Dimension E521
  Monitor: 1280 x 1024 pixels
 Graphics: ATI Radeon X1300 (nVidia card)
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2

I was thinking of downgrading to an earlier version, but I can't seem 
to find a safe way to do this (can't find info on fresh install 
procedure).

Any help?


Steve