[orca-list] new to Orca with problems

["Jon C. Pierson" <joncpierson comcast net>]

Hi,
I'm still determined to migrate to Ubuntu but am having some serious
loss-of-speech issues.

I have just installed "ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386" to a machine configured as
follows:
Intel board, 2gb processor, 2gb ram, on-board sound and Audigy, n-vidia
video card.
I put the Ubunto os on a clean 30gb hd.
First problem I have is that the friendly little bongos are gone so when to
login is a bit of guesswork.
So I thought I should update some programs and chose the list offered to me
and typed my password in and tabbed to ok and pressed enter. I promply lost
speech.
I then reloaded Orca from the altF2 box and got just the Orca greeting.
I have had the same problem when trying to access accessibility features as
I am trying to turn on the speech at login. I checked the box in the Orca
preferences but that doesn't give me speech at login so I thought that the
Accessibility menu would be the next best place to try.
So does anyone have ideas as to why speech goes away so often and where I
might look for a fix?

Jon