return to Kubuntu 8.10

[Stephen]

Dear All

I  have recently upgraded Kubuntu 8.10 to 9.04.  I now regret this as
many things are not working as before.

My audio CD's will not play in Amarok; my favourite package manager 
Synaptic was removed; K3B will not copy a music CD; my menu command to 
remount my XP partition remounts the partition but as read only; 
Konqueror has lost many of its configurable options such as having a 
limited "View Mode" of only Icons, Details Columns.  I like Dolphin even 
less.

While I had 8.10 I changed graphics cards to an NVIDIA with 256MB RAM on 
board, but never got it to work properly.  For these reasons I made the 
transition to 9.04 which did not improve the NVIDIA situation.  When I 
select the NVIDA driver downloaded from the NVIDIA website and install 
it X crashes and I have to reboot and chose the recovery route where I 
then fix X and boot into a gui again, but not using the NVIADA 
proprietorial driver.

So much is now not behaving in 9.04, that I want to go back to 8.10.  I 
downloaded an image, burned to CD and tried to boot to 8.10 live.
However, it did not boot into a gui.  I boot into a screen with a yellow
lower half and a blue upper part.  The mouse travels across the blue but
not the yellow.  I am forced to remove the power and take the CD out and
reboot normally into my menu options of XP or 9.04.

I tried Mandriva live CD and that just booted to a black screen and hung
there doing nothing.  I have tried other live CD's from various editions 
of Linux Format but nothing works (touchwood - that was a joke for the 
British readers).

The situation is now so silly I do not know what to do.  I do not like
the lost functionality in 9.04.  I do like the new KDE but not at the
expense of so many other things going wrong.

Is there something about the stability of .04 and .10 that I do not 
know.  Is one an improvement on the other?

How do I reinstall Kubuntu 8.10 over 9.04?

Any help appreciated.  Thanks and wait to hear


Stephen