Upgrading 64 bit to 32 bit with /home partition

[LegoAddict]

So in my laptop running Ubuntu 8.10 64 bits I have a / partition and a /home partition.

I have been having... issues... with the lack of 64 bit support in some apps (Boxee, Flash, etc. I can watch youtube videos with the Flash alpha but it's very very unreliable)

So I was wondering if the next time I upgraded or anything I could just install Ubuntu to my harddrive simply mounting the /home partition as /home and then installing a 32 bit Ubuntu on the / partition. Would my settings break? Would the apocalypse commence?

btw, my processor is an Intel Core2 Duo TI800, which supports both 32 and 64 bits. I'm dual booting with 32 bit Vista.

Another problem is that I have 4 GB of RAM. Would I still get the most out of a 32 bit OS? Would my performance suffer?

[rben13]

This is something I'm curious about, as well. I have a hard drive that served as my Ubuntu drive in my old system, and was wondering if it was possible to change it to 64-bit from 32-bit. (Although, after seeing the issues with lack of 64-bit support, I'm not so sure.)

I guess my question is: can you change from 32 to 64 or vice versa without having to reinstall everything? I have a sneaking suspicion you can't.

[LegoAddict]

I don't think you can do that...

But this would be reinstalling everything on a fresh system with just my settings intact.