Weird booting issues

Ok. I have a dual boot system running XP and Ubuntu. Everything works fine when I am running XP but when i restart to boot up by Ubuntu partition, I find that my sound card is completely missing from my system, (I have an M2N-E (not SLI) motherboard with an integrated SoundMAX ADI1988 card) I cant mount my external drives (simply says permission is denied), and when I tell Ubuntu to restart the computer, It just goes to the login screen and the restart and power buttons located there do not function which pretty much leaves me the only option of a soft reset to try again. Now here's the weird part, this only happens after I switch from XP to Ubuntu and I have to reboot my computer at least once, sometimes many multiple times to finally boot into my "good" version of Ubuntu. But when I finally get a "good" version of Ubuntu to boot, it works like a charm and all of the aforementioned problems are non-existent. Does anyone have any advice for me? I have a feeling its some sort of permission problem, like a password is being accepted and rejected based on something to do with GRUB 2 and my computer is simply operating in a "locked down" state. Just my 2 cents though.