Hardy Herron probs?

[squareyes]

Hi all,
On Sunday last thunderbird started bringing in emails with incorrect 
senders, no headers and
completely empty bodies. I checked with my ISP who had no issues, all 
these emails were still
on their server in complete condition. I had been running 7.04 and 
decided maybe it was time to move up to
Hardy Heron. I installed from CD with no problems, but now I have a few.

Before I did the fresh install, I copied everything I wanted to save to 
4 dvd's, I have 2 dvd combo drives both LG,
that up to now haven't given any problems, but now after the Hardy 
install, neither drive will read any of these
Dvd's. All can be accessed from an old dvd combo drive on an XP machine 
so it appears to have written them OK.

Firefox is behaving very strangely, losing all colour at random , and 
gradually going very dark grey, almost like
machine going into power save, sometimes after only a few minutes.
Firefox randomly resets itself to "offline mode" some sites open in a 
highly magnified state, 5mm letter now up to 25mm.
where all controls are off screen, and with the mouse button held down 
can  move the page around to get to the tool bar
Have had to Ctrl Alt Delete and restart X, which itself opens the 
Desktop also in a highly magnified state. Click on Desktop  few times 
usually restores to original size

DeVeDe is outputting iso files that when burnt to image on this box with 
either DVD drive result in an extremely jerky video, and are not 
recognised by my DVD player. Have tried transfering ISO to the windows 
box, but writing software  (nero)will not recognise the ISO.

One consolation,  Thunderbird now working fine :-)

Could I be having some major hardware problems, am on dialup, so don't 
fancy re-installing 7.04 and going through the
necessary hours re-installing software I use, if I don't have too.
I have installed 8.04 on 3 other machines using this CD. All working fine.

Machine
3.8 dual core Athlon
2gig ram
256 gig hard drive
256 meg nvidia video.(using the "new" nvidia driver)

Many thanks in advance
Take Care
Winton