I'm going to go ahead and try the WINE bit, but I have a feeling it's going to run significantly slower then running it natively, and it already ran slow to begin with.
@GTM
I don't know why, but I've NEVER had any luck with Ubuntu or any other Linux distro for that matter. Every time I have an issue with it, I ask, but 99 times out of 100, the instructions people give, googled or not, don't work. I've followed them word for word, even copied and pasted the instructions (making appropriate changes, I know the user folder isn't called ~USER~), but they never work.
I don't only have my netbook. I also have my PC, and it has more issues then my netbook with Ubuntu, even though it has vastly superior hardware. Example, the wireless adapter I have on my computer isn't supported with Ubuntu even though it's 3 years old now and the N standard is in full swing. So I have to use ndiswrapper to get the driver working, but to get ndiswrapper, I either have to download it (and without an internet connection, that's impossible), or download it to a flashdrive from another computer (usually Windows). And when I do that, I follow the instructions, but (and you can chant along with this one) they never work. I think I managed to get ndiswrapper working once from the instructions, but I don't remember how.
I've been trying to get into Ubuntu for years now. I mean, it's rather appealing. Free, does just about everything I normally do on Windows, free, and so on. But so far it's only proved to be more frustrating then enjoyable. It's as if I have the one particular hardware setup that just doesn't work (and yet Windows 7 worked out of the box for me, only had to install my wireless adapter drivers).