In the interest of full disclosure
Part 1:
Was working on Access2003-WinXP-Pentium4-1gig RAM system at a client site, and ran some Access-VB routines to populate a new system I'm deploying. Basically created 850 relational datasets. Overall not a lot of data: about a half-million records scattered among 12 tables.
The routines ran very fast, as they usually do on XP and Access, but they eventually destabilized and then altogether locked up Access (the machine didn't crash).
Call it bad DFS code or bad MS-Office code - whatever, it was a little disappointing. The identical system - same routines and same datasets - running on WinServer2000-Xeon-2gigRAM and WinServer2003-P4-1gigRAM executed flawlessly.
Moral: even with 1gig of RAM, XP-Access couldn't handle much data manipulation.
I really like Ubuntu, but let's face it, it does have it's headaches. After using distros like Mepis...
I found this article to be of interest to my reading, I am sure that the true Linux community will appreciate these points of views. ?page=2 The Strange Case...
Part 2:
Using KNode (KDE 3.4.2) on Slackware 10.2. Reading newsgroup posts. Click the thread breastle, it loads the article in the lower pane. After 5 or 8 seconds - poof! - the article disappears and the pane is solid white. Wait for a while and nothing happens - the article doesn't reappear.
Finally, click the thread breastle again, the article reappears and won't disappear again.
Moral: sloppy OSS code leads to irritating behavior