Jaunty Jackalope: The Aftermath

Having installed Ubuntu 9.04, I now have to face the aftermath. As I discovered with the last upgrade, there are consequences and the first one that I've discovered this time around is that there is no sound when I play flash games or flash videos. However, there is sound for music and movies etc. Why this should be, I've no idea but my six year old granddaughter was not amused when she couldn't hear any sounds while playing her favourite Yahoo flash game this afternoon. I'm now under pressure to come up with a solution. I did reinstall some drivers that had been disabled by the installation and had been warned beforehand that "some 3rd party entries in your sources list were disabled. Reenable with 'software properties' tool or your package manager" (which I did). Maybe when I restart the PC tomorrow, all will be well. I doubt it however, and will probably have to begin the inevitable quest for answers. 

This little problem has been coupled with the failure of my laptop to connect to the home Wi-Fi router. It connects at school without any problem but not at home. For some weeks now it has been slow to connect when brought home from school. Initially, it would not recognise that a network was present but after five minutes or so it would and then the connection would remain stable. This latest trouble seems to be an escalation of these earlier difficulties. So far I can't see any obvious differences between 9.04 and the earlier version but I've really not had a chance to look around much. I'd also like to try to run a portable version of Ubuntu within Windows as outlined on this site. The download is 438Mb. so I might try it next weekend. I really do need to clean up the hard drive on my laptop. As well as having a dual boot system (Windows and Ubuntu 8.04), I also have two virtual PCs set up within Vista using Microsoft's Virtual PC and VMWare. I should just reinstall Vista and start afresh, after all the laptop is now two and half years old and it is full of all sorts of rubbish that I've experimented with briefly and discarded.