Greetings everyone, just let me say that at this point I have installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my computer and am very happy with it. That being said, there are a couple of issues that I have that I would appreciate input with.

To give my system specs: HP computer, AMD 64 Dual Core 6000+ processor, 3GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS graphics card, no third party sound card. Ubuntu downloaded and installed drivers for the NVIDIA after first boot up, to make use of the 3D rendering.

I have also installed Wine to run a couple of games, such as EVE Online and NWN.

1) Boot issues. Sometimes I get a Kernel Panic error while booting my system. At other times I will get a freeze up during the Ubuntu graphics loading page.

I recently switched over from Vista, where i was getting constant BSD while booting up (ie dozens of times before the system finally booted and ran fine afterward). At first I thought this was just a Windows problem, but now that I am experiencing this same issue with Ubuntu, I am starting to think that it's a Hard Drive problem. Any inputs?

2) While running Ubuntu after it boots up fine, I get an issue sometimes where programs will just shut down on their own, such as FireFox and the RythmBox music player. Is there something I can check or do that may prevent this from happening?

3) The other computers on my network are running windows still, though I will be converting in the future. In particular, all my music is store on an XP computer, as well as most of my shared folders that I access on a regular basis. I've had an issue where I can only mount one (1) of the shared folders on my XP computer at a time to access. If I attempt to mount a second folder, I get a password prompt that doesn't accept my user password for Unbuntu (I have no password stored for the XP system). What happens is that I enter the password, make sure that I am trying to access the MSHOME group, and it just keeps popping back up over and over again.

Is there anyway that I can mount multiple shared folders from XP, or is this a standard issue?

Thanks in advance. Please note that I am new to Linux, and while I have a bit of experience with CL, I am by no means an expert.