Doing a little more checking I might give Gentoo a try tomorrow.
jim
Ahahaha. Feel free to PM me with any problems you have. Memorize the manual, make liberal use of the forum and IRC channels. Installing Gentoo if you don't know what you're doing is Fun & Informative.
Installing it if you do know what you're doing is tedious.
That said, I LOVE Gentoo. It's got a major place in my heart--I learned more from two days of installing it than I did in months of running Ubuntu. I'm not exaggerating either. It will literally be hours before you see a working command prompt (well, before you see a Gentoo command prompt, you'll be chmodded in through another OS from the start. Ignore what other people say, the most important thing is to select a distro that is 64bit and recognizes your network card. I went with Ubuntu, but the diehards will try to convince you to do SysRescue (which is a great tool by itself)), and if you get to a GUI in less than 24 hours you either didn't sleep or you're psychic at figuring out error messages.
Eventually I settled down with Arch, and I've been using it for about a year. It takes the best ideas from Gentoo (rolling release, as close to vanilla as possible), combines them with the best package manager I've ever seen, seriously smooths out the installation, and still makes you a more informed user. After installing both Gentoo (once) and Arch (on several PCs), it's kind of shocking for me to try out Ubuntu and see how different the choices it makes are from what I would have.
Chances are if you successfully install Arch or Gentoo, you'll learn enough to get you to the point where you could go back into Ubuntu and fix your problems in minutes. You just won't want to, because now you've got a better distro.