Intrepid ALphas (or I) broke many things

Apologies for being long-winded. Here's the background:

I was trying to make dual desktops work on an AMD-64 Opteron SMP box with ATI R3xxx-class
(ASUS EN6800GT Silent) video card, under Hardy. After a week or so of no luck with
open or ATI drivers, I made the mistake of installing the Intrepid Alphas. This was not a good idea,
apparently:

1. I still (2008-10-27) can't make the dual-head stuff work with open source or ATI drivers.
    The best I can do is to make the two monitors mirror each other, which is not what I wanted.

    Besides the problem(s) in configuration of xorg.conf, it is not clear to me which tools
    are correct ones to maintain the desktop: aticonfig, randr, Catalyst, System/Preferences/ScreenResolution...

    glxgears runs like mud, when it does run.

2. Sound is very screwed up. This happened around Alpha 4 or so, I think. It's been mostly broken since
   then:
     - System/Preferences/Sound thinks for a bit, then evaporates. This is new as of a day or 3 ago.
       Before that, it would segfault and create a /var/crash entry. No crash entries now, but it doesn't work.

    - Some games (e.g., enigma, frozen-bubble) are broken. ddd enigma
         shows a segfault:

2 0x00007f9bdeedcdd4 in pa_threaded_mainloop_free () from /usr/lib/libpulse.so.0
(gdb)
#3 0x00007f9bdf113026 in pulse_free () from /usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so
(gdb)

    - frozen-bubble dies this way, if I turn on diagnostics:

Use of uninitialized value in eval "string" at ./frozen-bubble line 103 (#6)
Use of uninitialized value $ENV{"LANGUAGE"} in pattern match (m//) at
 ./frozen-bubble line 107 (#6)
        [[ Frozen-Bubble-2.1.0 ]]

[SDL Init] Segmentation fault

3. MOre sound oddities:

     - Youtube movies play OK.

     - Kaffeine will play some files, but segfaults at the end.

     - totem dies this way:
1 0x00007ff77fd02352 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libpulse.so.0
(gdb)
#2 0x00007ff77fce5dd4 in pa_threaded_mainloop_free () from /usr/lib/libpulse.so.0
(gdb)
#3 0x00007ff77ff1d038 in ?? () from /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstpulse.so
(gdb)

    - skype stopped working this way:
xf7219af7 in pthread_join () from /lib32/libpthread.so.0
(gdb) up
#1 0xf071178b in ?? () from /usr/lib32/libpulse.so.0

  - the system forgets volume settings over restart, so the TADA file at
   startup IS VERY LOUD. This is also new as of the last few days.

So, I'm not exactly happy with where things are. So, bottom line:

I'd rather not do Yet Another Clean Reinstall of Ubuntu next week,
because it'll take me several weeks to get all of my other code
reinstalled, configured, and working.

Question 1: Is there a way to get Ubuntu to "please reinstall everything
that's here, but don't clobber my config files"?

Question 2: Is pulseaudiio really broken? If so, what are my alternatives
for the near term?

Question 3: Can someone point me at a CURRENT way (or current as
of next week) to really make dual-head ATI on an X-64 box work?

Thanks. Robert