So the madwifi worked as soon as I installed Ubuntu 9.04, thats good. Only thing is when i run firefox and scroll around on a page it is super laggy. Also, when i drag the windows around it is also very slow. Vista works fine on my comp so im confused why a lighter quicker os is makin my computer run slower than normal. The visual effects won't turn on either which makes me think its the graphics card. Nvidia Geforce 8300m (i think)I know its proprietary but when i checked the drivers all it had was the atheros mad wifi. Also, i don't know if it has anything to do with the partitions being so weird on my comp. I have a vista partition, an ubuntu 8.04 and an ubuntu 9.04. thanks for reading and all the help guys. Oh and my computer is Compaq cq60. 2.0 ghz athlon x2 processor. 250 gb harddrive and 2 gb ram

This is a graphics card issue. Have you installed the driver for your video? Should be able to find it under "restricted drivers" if there is one available.

I am also running Ubuntu-9.04 (Ultimate-edition-2.2)
( http://ultimateedition.info/ )

when I first installed it today it ran ok
but earlier when I ran it it started to act crazy and slow, like your saying.

I also have an Nvidia card too.
I was at first using this kernel
Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-13-generic

To fix mine, luckily Ultimate edition offers 2 kernel choices at boot menu
I chose the earlier kernel;
Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic

I'm not sure if that helps but it fixed mine

Its very odd. When i was running it off the live cd it said that it was trying to download the proprietary driver. It didnt work however. I figured if i installed it maybe it would work. Then it didnt even show up under proprietary drivers. So then i downloaded the driver off the Nvidia website. I go to install it and it says "gedit has not been able to detect the character coding."

Well, that is the kind of message you would get if you tried to install that driver windows style, by double-clicking on it. That is not how it works on linux. You should switch to console by pressing ctrl + alt + f1, then log in and run
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
and then install the driver by doing
./NVIDIA-etc (name of the file, use TAB to expand)
When it has been installed, you do
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start
You may still need to run
sudo nvidia-xconfig
for the new information to be written to the xorg config files.