I've been toying with doing this for a long time, and even though I know it will provide a fix, my many years consulting in IT have instilled a problem-solving mentality that I find hard to shake. I would rather find out what's causing the problem to prevent it happening again, instead of running the risk of hitting the same hurdle in the future. I have been using Linux (primarily Ubuntu) for almost 20 years and have never had an issue with any upgrade of any flavour that hasn't been quick and simple to fix, which is why this one is doing my head in.
It's still a good and viable (inevitable??
) option to start with a clean slate, but my background is in software development, not servers, so it won't be a simple or quick task to build a new one, implement all the security I have added in bits and pieces over time, and then migrate the existing domains/apps running on it. That's why I'm reluctant to go down that path without exhausting all avenues. It runs my mail server and private cloud among other things, and I can't afford them to be offline for too long if I can get away with it.