As always, it seems, the ubgrade to the latest and greatest Ubuntu means fixing a couple of things. At one point, this meant wireless and power management, but times are improving! Now it's just power management. I have taken to using ndiswrapper for my wireless cards and find it a lot easier than trying to hack the open source ones to kind of, maybe work. To me, that's a biggie because my main PC is a laptop. A laptop that I carry, open, use for a while, then close and put away. Rinse, rewash, etc. The point is, that I often work on the go and expect to be able to flip open my laptop and pick up where I left off for a quick few minutes of work or play.
I found two problems on my Compaq Presario F700 laptop on Ubuntu 9.04: suspend and a clock error. In the first, suspend worked beautifully--but only on AC. If I attempted to either suspend or resume while on battery power, the whole thing came crashing down. If, on the other hand, I suspend while on AC, unplugged the computer, ported it around, then plugged it up and resumed, everything was fine. The second issue was similar: only on batter power, I would get sundry kernel messages relating to the clocksource (usually, "clocksource tsc is unstable").
The latter I fixed by adding the option hpet=disbled to my kernel options in grub. The former, I never did figure out and downgraded to Ubuntu 8.04. Suspend works there with the hints described here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NvidiaLaptopBinaryDriverSuspend , minus the Xorg configuration. Moments like this almost make me want a Mac...