Finally!...I'm spending most of my time working in the Ubuntu half of my computer (multiboot). I gave up wishing the GUI networking stuff would work, and mounted my docs from the server using the command line; then automounted by editing /etc/fstab I had heard about this in my Linux group, but got the details by searching on the Internet.
I also have changed, mostly, the applications I use to those I can use in Ubuntu 9.10. There are still a couple of newsletters I am doing in Windows...