I bought a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Ubuntu installed.
At certain points, the Desktop will go into a state where it becomes impossible to start new applications-- at least those that create new windows. Launching one will create an icon that says "Starting Firefox"; it will time out and fail. One event that can cause this to occur is exiting a Terminal window. I've also seen Terminals die randomly, and the system enters this state when this happens.
Every time this happens, I have to reboot. There is no way to figure out what is going on, since any application that requires launching a new window (including the Terminal) fails.
On another note, whenever I try to change the hostname of my computer to something other than dell-desktop, the change is reverted whenever I log out and reboot.
Who do I go to for support on this? Is this a known problem?