Yeah GNOME's the way to go. Since you can't get KDE to work with Ubuntu (Kubuntu) you might want to try out openSUSE which is, in my opinion, the best KDE distro available. You might also like the 'gnome slab' (similar to the gnome slab openSUSE uses) you can install it by typing in terminal:

Code:
sudo apt-get install gnome-main-menu
and then right clicking on the panel>select "Add to Panel">Add Gnome main menu.
Then again maybe I'm just rambling out useless suggestions. It's a shame you couldn't get KDE to work though, hopefully a future update will fix the problem for you. KDE 4.2 isn't far off - you never know It might just fix whatever problems you experienced.