I've been running Mandrake on my desktop and laptop for years. It's been good to me. I've even send money to them.
Several months ago, I upgraded my laptop from Mandrake 9.0 to 9.1. I did it against my better judgement -- i.e., I upgraded, I didn't re-install. But it seemed to go smoothly (I think there's even a journal item about it).
But the other day, I just installed MDK 9.1 on a fresh system and noticed that there were some things on that new system that were not on my laptop. Hmm.
So I figured I might as well upgrade my laptop to MDK 9.2 (the latest that's available these days). So I did. Again, I did the "upgrade" instead of the "install." Yeah, that turned out to be a bad idea. Bunches of things didn't work after I rebooted.
So I re-installed 9.2 over the whole thing, and things are much better. I had to do a little mojo to get things the way I liked them:
* To get the Macromedia flash player working, I had to do the following:
cd /usr/lib
ln -s libstdc++.so.5.0.5 libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3
because that player plugin seems to require that .so, but it isn't included in any of the MDK RPM's anymore (I'm guessing it's old).
* Need an executable named "mozilla", because a lot of stuff is keyed off it:
cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s firebird mozilla
Then life is good.