You sound frustrated that your system does not perform the way you
want. It would seem that the source of your problem goes back a long
way and it has little to do with deficiencies in Ubuntu.

You are not running a pure Ubuntu system since you installed from Ultimate 2.1
(according to a previous posting) which comes with all sorts of things not found
in Ubuntu itself. The only way to get back to a regular Ubuntu release is to
clean up your repositories so that it only has those found in a regular release
and then Upgrade. It will want to remove lots of things and even then you will
have lots of things leftover on your system. Afterwards, you can clean up from
the command line with sudo apt-get autoremove.

You can continue as you are, but that means that advice such as Emil's may not
work for you. Sometimes you get lucky by using a product such as Ultimate, but
often times it causes more headaches than it resolves in my experience. This
applies to Mint and other wannabes as well. I am happy for people who have had
success with them but it does not mean that it is a panacea for others.

This is my opinion for what it is worth. The best way to use Ubuntu is by
installing Ubuntu from an Ubuntu installation disk. Afterwards you can add other
desktops from the repositories. Adding third party repositories causes
instability and dependency issues which may resolve themselves or not. It is
best not to venture far from standard practice until you are experienced enough
to cope with the ensuing problems. Adding the restricted-extras is a piece of
cake compared to dealing with problems of having a system which is markedly
different from those you seek advice from.