The Latest Craziness

I have three partitions on the HP laptop- XP, Linspire beta, and the third one I save for experimenting. I have had Mepis loaded on it. I try to Like Mepis, it is a really good distro, it works great on the HP, it just lacks a little polish, but it works, but it lacks polish, but.... I have spent the last week switching off between Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I want the KDE version, but when I loaded it the first time networking did not work and it took me a while to fugure out the no root thing. I still could not get networking going, so I loaded Ubuntu. Ubuntu is great everything works, it has a lot of polish, but I hate Gnome, pretty blah, definitely not as tweakable as KDE. I searched for some Gnome themes to spice things up, but I did not find anything I like. I spent the next several days reloading Kubuntu and Ubuntu, and the networking that I did eventually get working previously would not work in either. I learned a long time ago that if you computer refuses to act like it should you should just leave it alone, and I did until tonight. Low and behold, Ubuntu loaded and networking worked. I installed a couple of cool crystal themes and icon sets, and I can live with it for a while. I also installed KDE via apt-get, it crashed last time I tried, but I also got some error messages. This time- no error messages, I will see if it works. That would be the best of both worlds, I could switch between KDE and Gnome as I see fit.
Having been spoiled by Linspire, it is shuch a pain to have to install flash and manually edit fstab so I can mount the Windows partition in Ubuntu.