Reinstall Gnome

[John Jason Jordan <johnxj comcast net>]

I have Jaunty x86_64 on a Thinkpad T61. Jaunty is fully up to date, all
updates are applied.

Everything has always been rock solid until about 4 weeks ago. However,
suspend has never worked satisfactorily - I can go into suspend, but
cannot restore. Knowing this, I ignored it. I don't really need suspend
anyway. But about 4 weeks ago I tried it again for the first time in
months. Sure enough, I could not restore. So I used the power button
and restarted, because that was my only option.

When Ubuntu came back up my bluetooth mouse was not working. I tried
everything but could not get it to work. However, bluetooth was working
because I could connect to my phone. And hcitool found the mouse, and
the cc switch executed without error. A local Linux guru suggested that
if bluetooth was working but the mouse was not, then the problem had to
be in X. That made sense, so I switched from the nv driver to the
proprietary nVidia driver and rebooted. When Ubuntu came back up the
mouse was working.

The mouse continued to work until a couple days ago when it quit again.
Switching video drivers did not repair the problem. 

I now suspect that something is messed up in Gnome. I say this because:

1) My desktop font (Sans 9 pt) is messed up - some numerals appear in a
slightly smaller point size. And the line spacing is too wide. And if I
type something in a dialog box the text jumps down so the bottom half
of the letters is hidden. 

2) I am getting crashes in Firefox and other applications several times
a day. The Firefox crashes occur when clicking on a link or entering a
search string in a Google dialog box. Other applications crash at
random - that is, I cannot figure out a pattern.

3) The computer is locking up about once every couple of days. Twice it
happened when typing text into a Google search box; other times it has
happened randomly - I cannot see any pattern.

I should add that reinstalling Jaunty is not a good option. I have many
programs installed that took a lot of tweaking to get them to work,
tweaks which I don't even remember. These are specialized applications
for use in linguistics. Yes, some day I will buy a new computer and
probably do a fresh install. I just want to avoid it if at all possible.

It may not be Gnome, but I need a clear acquittal because at this point
Gnome is my top suspect. I want to reinstall Gnome, but I cannot figure
out how to do so. I'm sure Gnome consists of several modules, but what
are they? And what will happen if I try to do it when the GUI is
running? Should I do it from the command line in Recovery Mode?

Thanks in advance for answers and any other suggestions and advice.