My Ubuntu has been Breaking Lately

Over the past couple of weeks, I have experience a larger number of stubborn problems on my Ubuntu Intrepid machine. Here are just a couple of the problems I've been experiencing:
  • A number of annoying Firefox problems. Two in particular: (1) When I'm downloading files, sometimes firefox will tell me that its got just a few more seconds to download when in fact it has finished downloading. This is annoying because it leaves *.part files all over the place. (2) When I shut down firefox, it has become more frequent that it doesn't fully shut down, and instead I have to go into the system monitor to kill it manually.
  • VLC stopped working for me on *.mp4 and *.wmv files. In fact the only sorts of videos it seems to play consistently are *.mpeg files. And yes, I have all the codecs installed (so fuck off). I have to use mplayer instead.
  • When I insert my flash drive into the USB port, it no longer automatically mounts it. Instead I have to go to Places->Computer and double click on it, at which point it gives the following message: Internal error: No mount object for mounted volume. It nontheless mounts it. This bug has been reported here.
Intrepid, though an improvement over Hardy in terms of stability, still though isn't that stable. I'm really hoping that Jaunty will finally reach a real stable state (it should not be fucking hard to mount a flash drive).

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