Beautiful but frustrating — A few minutes with KDE 4.0.0

I have updated my Kubuntu 7.10 to final KDE4.0.0 from that my good friends in the Kubuntu team created.  It is beatiful, but frustrating.  And I need some help trying to figure out where to start to track my problems down.

• Freezes whenever I do something disk intensive:  I use VMWare aware and whenever I turn on my VMWare session, KWin? or something else freezes.  And its not just vmware that is causing the problems.  Tried to burn a cd, the new Kubuntu Gutsy Live CD and got a screen freeze, tried to open up a large OpenOffice document complete with screenshots, etc and the screen froze.  I’m using the turn screen because I don’t know exactly what to do to try and troubleshoot these freezes.  I don’t have access to another computer to try and ssh into the box and troubleshoot, I have only my computer which is either in at a client where I don’t have access to another computer, or I’m in my hotel room and I don’t have access to another computer.  I see activitiy on my Wi-Fi indicator, but besides that I don’t get any other indicator.  I can’t Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and kill the session, I can’t change to any other session through the function keys, no hard disk activity indication.  If I’m playing a cd or soemthing the music will start to skip as it is frozen.
• Sound at startup:  Where do I control the loud new startup sound that I am hearing when I sartup?  I really enjoy this new sound, but if I mute my speaker, turn the sound down or whatever it is still loud enough to bother my co-workers in thier office.  Some help would be greatly appreciated.  BTW the sound control buttons, up and down both work but the “mute” button doesn’t have any affect

Some specs about my laptop:

• Dell Latitude D830 with 4 Gigs of RAM
• NVidia Graphics card, with the NVidia driver in use
• Intel sound card

Let me know what else I need to troubleshoot this.

Thanks