That was about the time of the Redhat 9 to Fedora shift and I felt the pain too. I was using RH9 for the stability, but then switched to Fedora like everyone was supposed to. Well, that was a big bag of something left on the doorstep. I had to spend countless evenings messing with configs to get the system useable; then upgrades would break things. Finally found stability with Ubuntu after a few years, and still use it today, albeit with KDE since Gnome's philosophy of unconfigurable defaults is disappointing.