To All; thanks for the input and ideas. The second hard drive is a good thought
and may be the way to go. That would require rebuilding the whole system,
something I was trying to avoid.

I'm running 64bit right now and was leaning towards 64bit 10.04 but have heard
that 32 bit may be more "stable". I've got 8 gigs of ram and understand that
32bit won't see all of that, right?

use gparter (don't know if that's the correct
title of the tool...) to make a new /home directory; copy my current /home to
that new directory; do the 10.04 64bit upgrade.
Would that be totally crazy?
It would be nice to be able to do a Complete copy of my current drive to another
drive before starting this so I'd have something to fall back to if disaster
struck. :) Is there a tool that will do a mirror copy?