A little word about upgrades. They work differently from say Windows. In
Windows you need to re-boot afterwards. In Linux (Ubuntu is a distribution
of Linux) you do not. This can fool you. Everything will stay fine until
you do re-boot. Then if one of the libraries or drivers did not get
upgraded previously things are out of whack. This can be a headache.
Re-booting right away is not a solution either. It just lets you know there
is a problem sooner. The way to fix it is to do another upgrade. First you
update the package list then you upgrade again. Hopefully this will fix it.
Sometimes not. This is not meant to discourage you. Eventually everything
will catch up. It is because libraries are shared in Linux (unlike in
Windows where you can have multiple libraries from different vendors doing
the same thing or even different versions) and one application may have
upgraded the library and left others that have not upgraded behind. This is
just why it happens. It does not fix it. Even experienced users can have
this happen.
A second problem that you will face is 11.10 is NOT a long term support
release. It will expire next April. You can and should upgrade the version
from 11.10 to 12.04. This will give you 5 years of support. You can upgrade
in October from 12.04 to 12.10, but should probably not since 12.10 is
another 18 month support release. Basically every second April is a LTS
release. All others are 18 months and you must upgrade each six months or
re-install if you skip a version upgrade. The LTS releases go for 5 years
and you can skip those in between and still upgrade to 14.04 when it comes
out in April 2014.
When asking for support it is good to tell us what sort of problems. It is
also good to tell about your hardware, which version (you did) and whether
it is 32 or 64-bit. Important info could be Make and Model, RAM amount,
processor type, graphics card, wifi model, type and version of Linux,
desktop environment being used, etc. You can find most of this out by
issuing some commands at a terminal. You will get used to that. I won't
worry you now. It is not essential but is useful to know a few commands.
You do not have to memorize. They can be Googled.
I am glad that you are enjoying 11.10. That is a good start. 12.04 is a
better release and 12.10 is looking even better. It will not be released
for about a month, but I am running the beta.
Keep upgrading and let us know if it fixes itself or tell us what exactly
is wrong and we can be of more help.