Sure, GE works fine on 9.04 generally speaking - but it needs hardware
accelerated 3D support, and it has trouble if some desktop effects are
enabled. So the questions to ask are:

Do I have hardware accelerated 3D video drivers running? (if not, get
that fixed and try GE again)
Do I have any extra compiz effects enabled? (if so, disable them and try
GE again)

9.04 is problematic for people with intel video, and for many ATI video
chipsets. Intel video is dramatically improved in 9.10 and hopefully ATI
will catch up to the current version of X soon enough to help users of
9.10 as well.

I'm running GE successfully on my Sony laptop on 9.04. It wouldn't run in any
useful way on 8.10

It works fine for me in both GNOME and KDE.

I installed it through synaptic instead of directly and while it
installed better this way, its so incredibly slow - I can boot to XP,
make my route and log back off in the time it takes to make the route
on Ubuntu (I use it to mark my morning routes with the dogs).

Try installing it via medibuntu

http://medibuntu.org/

There are instructions on the site to setup medibuntu. Then there is a
list of packages for various Ubuntu versions. I'm not sure if it loads
required files but it may work better.

That is the one Im using now.. it loads, and loads faster - but at least
on my two laptops - totally unusable.

If windows is faster something has gone horribly wrong with your
ubuntu install.

If ubuntu is that slow, then I'm thinking that you have an intel video
chip. The intel video driver has a well known problem on 9.04 - any
previous version of ubuntu would give 10 times better video performance.

The good news is that intel video performance is looking pretty good in
9.10 - I've been running the 9.10 alpha on a test machine with intel
i945 video, and I'd swear someone put in a new nvidia card when I wasn't
looking.

I have a ATI on my pc and Intel on my laptop.
Yea, 8.04 was fine - usable.. not now though.
I hope 9.10 is better. ... and if its that good
I need it now