First off, I'm a total newb that has no idea what I'm doing.

With that settled, I have a question.

I recently partitioned my laptop so as to install Kubuntu onto it to dual-boot with windows vista. I had Kubuntu on for a moderate amount of time (very much lost) but eventually the entire system was damaged in some way. Its unusable at this point, so I decided would just replace the Kubuntu partitions with Ubuntu ones. I have an Ubuntu boot disk, but am still totally lost. Can someone please tell me exactly what do as if speaking to a small child?

There really isn't anything to it, just install Ubuntu onto the same partition that you put Kubuntu on. It will reformat and go on with the install as normal.

The problem is, its more complicated then that. There are multiple partitions, and the partition wizard won't let me select all of them.

Well, Windows only takes one partition, so everything else is for K/Ubuntu. If the old Ubuntu system spread itself over multiple partitions (I.E. one for swap, one for /home, a third for the root) then you can use the manual partitioner to chose those same partitions again.

Try to delete the partitions from with in vista. I'm an XP guy so I'm not sure of the vista path to the disk manager. But disk manager is where you want to be.
Once you have disk manager open in vista look at the main hard disk it should so tghe partition for disk C and it's file format. NTFS. Leave this one alone. Look just to the right of this segment for 3 or more partitions that windows usually labels UNKNOWN partition type.
Right click on each of them and choose Delete. Then right click on the whole part thats left (now Combined into 1 segment) and delete or something similar that partition that is left. When finished the right side of the display where Kubuntu was should now be labeled UN allocated space.
Or free space.
Now to be sure reboot vista and check it again.
Now you can install Ubuntu and tell it if it askes to use the Free space that's left on the drive.
Then search Google or this forum on how to edit the grub entires if the Kubuntu boot entry is still there when booting.