Ubuntu killed my laptop!

Ran up the Kubuntu 7.10 Live CD and started the install last night. It detected my external USB2 drive I wanted to use (sdb), and let me leave my my Windows C drive alone (sda). It took over the whole of sdb, creating about 6 partitions, why so many? not necessary to use the extended partition IMHO.

Then the installer offered to install the boot loader grub, so I went along with it. Little did I know this would break the system. The Installer displayed no warning about this potential hazard like it should have, at the least.

While it was formatting the drives I clicked the "Skip" button as I had already formatted the drive, so it only really needed the (empty) directory structures writing etc.. that was the installer's first fault, as the UI locked up, and the windows became corrupted. The "ubiquity" process was still taking up 95% of my CPU, so I assumed all was well under the hood, but after after 2 hours waiting, and no activity I rebooted the laptop to see what the damage was.

When the laptop started, with or without the USB2 external drive in I got this ominous display:
=====================
GRUB Loading stage1.5

GRUB loading please wait...
Error 5
_
=========

So when Kubuntu knew it was an external drive (it had given it that name!) did it install the grub knowing the stage1.5 would be inaccessible because the usb kernel drivers had not yet been loaded?

Quite a few visible bugs, even the Wireless connection wizard gets stuck displaying "Unknown", the workaround is to manually select the Wireless connection *again* to get it to complete the connection.

Konqueror displays a multitude of accented characters in little boxes all over the browser window from time to time.

The installer seems to have other issues as well:
Nov 7 19:49:42 ubuntu ubiquity: /proc/misc: No entry for device-mapper found
Nov 7 19:49:42 ubuntu ubiquity:
Nov 7 19:49:42 ubuntu ubiquity: Is device-mapper driver missing from kernel?
Nov 7 19:49:42 ubuntu ubiquity:
Nov 7 19:49:42 ubuntu ubiquity: Failure to communicate with kernel

..and why is it doing this before asking me!?
Nov 7 19:50:25 ubuntu ntfsresize: ntfsresize v1.13.1 (libntfs 9:0:0)
Nov 7 19:50:25 ubuntu ntfsresize: Device name : /dev/sda2
Nov 7 19:50:25 ubuntu ntfsresize: NTFS volume version: 3.1
Nov 7 19:50:25 ubuntu ntfsresize: Cluster size : 4096 bytes
Nov 7 19:50:25 ubuntu ntfsresize: Current volume size: 56696852992

Sometimes it feels almost like we are going backwards with GNU-Linux distros!