Colleagues have been coming up, looking at my laptop and snickering, asking how the upgrade went.

Well, I don't understand bootwait; apparently unbuntu does block for the /home mount, and having forced an fsck on bootup I can verify this -so why was sometimes X coming up without it? Other problems. But what happens if you add bootwait to the /home mount? The boot hangs. So if there is a disk you need mounted, you'd better know if the OS already mounts it early, as adding the attribute when it is not needed appears to be bad news

More problematic is the laptop won't resume from a suspend; I spent some time following the wiki guide to debugging suspend problems, but eventually reached the point where I'd had enough.

I have rolled back to Ubuntu 9.04, trying out the 64 bit version in the process. I will keep an eye on the power management bug and maybe try an upgrade when its fixed. Maybe.