Brightness Issue- possibly Jupiter's fault?

[Pragu]

Hello all,
I've been trying to cut down on power usage on my 11.04 eeepc netbook, so yesterday I installed Jupiter. It didn't appear to do anything, and for whatever reason it was eating up my ram, so I uninstalled it. Post restart, I can not adjust my brightness. When I hit the function key to lower brightness, the screen lights up to maximum brightness, then refreshes after a few seconds to a darker setting, but not the one i chose.

Is this some kind of bug, and is there any way to regain control of my brightness?

[Pragu]

Additional information-
I've tried installing and uninstalling jupiter, jupiter with eee support, eee-control, gnome-power-manager, and ubuntu-desktop to no avail.
When I hit the lower brightness key (Fn+F5) the brightness changes rapidly front light to dark to light cyclically, and the notify-osd box comes up but only displays the brightness at the maximum level.
When disconnected from the power cord, the screen flashes when i don't touch anything for about 30 seconds, then flashes again when i wiggle the mouse.
When i boot up, the the brightness flashes about 4-5 times. it also flashes on the GDM login screen sometimes.
Running "sudo setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=10" changes the brightness for a while, but it snaps back up after a little bit.
I'm thinking now a fresh install may be my only option. has anyone heard of this problem?