I had three more issues that occurred after upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10. First, it switched the sound system over to "pulseaudio" which broke the mic input and made audio output somewhat scratchy. I didn't realize this until I tried to use Skype. The solution:

sudo apt-get uninstall pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound
sudo reboot

I usually use an external mouse so I also didn't realize that the touchpad worked perfectly at the GDM login window, but after logging in it would stop and no amount of coaxing would bring it back. Turns out the upgrade disabled the checkbox under System + Preferences + Mouse + Touchpad. Just plug in a USB mouse and check that box again and the touchpad worked beautifully.

One last thing is that my changes to X to enable the media buttons on the side of the laptop no longer functions. I haven't found a solution to this one yet, but probably is related to the changes in the way X handles all the input devices.