I am going to try another brand shortly. (I don't think it's a hardware problem. I'm running the hated XP Windows on the same machine without difficulty.) But I do want to go back to Linux, if and when I can, and I find the ambition to go thru it all again with another set of rules.
9.2 definately seems a little touchier on my old Thinkpad Laptop (The thing should be retired! But since it does run Linux decently for web browsing, email, etc., I keep it around, and spend a little extra time to tweak things)... One of the biggest "show stoppers" is the fact that 9.2 comes with a buggy Kernal that affects certain ACPI functions - My laptop totally chokes on this kernel after rebooting. If I fail to have a 'net connection at the initial install time so I can do the YOU kernel update, the machine freezes within a couple minutes of booting. Fedora Core 2 & 3 work right out of the box on it. However, I love having 95% of the configuration in one spot - YaST, so I'll deal with the quirks.