I've been running Ubuntu Hardy on my laptop for about 2 years now because XP didn't have drivers for my audio and internet. Eventually I found the drivers, but I hate dealing with antivirus programs, so I want to stick with linux.

My old HD was 40Gb, but I ran out of space pretty quick so I got a 256GB. A few months after I installed it, I picked up my laptop case in a rush and didn't realize I hadn't zipped it. The corner went crashing into the carpet.

The next time I booted it up, it wanted to run the disk checker, but I skipped, assuming it was just the routine check. I kept on skipping it for about a month since I was always at school and didn't want to waste time. Eventually when I did let it run, it ended up going into command line and telling me bash or something was missing. I didn't really know why it wasn't satisfied, but everything seemed to work normally if I just skipped the check, so that's what I've been doing ever since.

But sometime last year the file manager started acting weird. If I do anything that brings up a file location dialog, the window greys out for about 10-15 seconds. After that, the dialog pops up and everything is normal again. But for some reason, this doesn't apply to KDE programs like Kolourpaint. My theory is that some part of Gnome must have been damaged by the write head jolting from the case impact when I dropped my laptop. (I believe it was off at the time.)

So, is there some way to switch everything from Gnome to KDE? Or can I reinstall Gnome without doing the whole OS?