I've been having serious trouble in Ubuntu. Can't connect to the internet without switching cables, long broken boot process, apps won't load, etc etc etc.

Well, I *think* I found the problem. It seems that, when I set my hard drive to LBA in my bios, these problems show themselves. When I set it to Auto, they do not. However, I cannot set this to auto, because when I do, Windows will not boot. I know this problem from back when the 2.5 kernels came out (I believe). I've had to do it in Linux ever since, but this is the first time it has ever screwed with my Linux installation. The only thing I can do right now, is change this setting in the BIOS every time I want to boot into Linux or Windows, and it's rather annoying. Anybody know what the problem is?

As far as I can tell from reading up on this online, Ubuntu has some issues with LBA vs normal mode, and where it puts its bootloader.
It seems that once it's booted up, Ubuntu doesn't care about the BIOS, and just accesses the disk as a whole by itself, but before that some errors could occur if key config files are in a place that the BIOS can't read...not sure if that applies to your situation or not, but it might.

Where is your bootloader installed to, which one is it, how big is your hard drive, things like that?

I don't really know the answer to the bootloader questions. It is whatever and wherever the default settings for the Ubuntu 5.04 installation are. Assuming this is on the MBR as usual with Linux boot loader installations. The hard drive is a western digital 80GB, plain old IDE hard drive.