yesterday i spent the entire day trying to install dapper (p3,384mb mem,250 gig hd nvidia geforce 5500) i have winxp on hda1 itried to install dapper livecd on hde5,30gig root,hde6 1gig swap i also tried the largest space which crashed at50% as did the other installations then i tried the alternate cd which installed the base system and halted at 17% on selecting and installing software so i did a server install which worked but when i tried to install xwindows and gnome it said ti reconfigure dpkg i did get in root at the command prompt and used aptitude which sort of worked except when i tried to load gnome it told me the human thehme was broken i finally gominto the desktop using a different theme but not much was installed and what was installed have of that was broken i been using ubuntu since warty and dont want to stop now but i could use some help

You should install ubuntu-base and ubuntu-desktop package to get the default desktop install, you may want to do (as root) "dpkg-reconfigure -a" to reconfigure all the packages installed first.