(V): there are no problems with board drivers or is that something WINE would be able to handle, or would be fixable via the UBUNTU software centre?

Well, I'm not exactly sure what you refer to with board drivers. But in general, driver installation on Ubuntu is a charm, as the system will detect all but the most exotic hardware, and load drivers automagically. The only exception is, if your piece of hardware is not supported by open source drivers. In every case that I came across, Ubuntu told me there was a proprietary driver available, and asked whether I wanted to download and install it. I said yes, and the download and installation was seamless. Compare that to hunting down drivers on vendors' sites with Windows. Also there is ndiswrapper, which will let you install and use Windows drivers for hardware that isn't otherwise supported, but that would be mostly old and obscure WinModems, etc. My system even instantly recognized my old TV stick that I couldn't even get the Windows drivers for... (well, not in a couple of hours of search)

It was nice to able alter a few lines in a duplicate of the start up disc to make the screen as you wanted it.

You'll love Linux. In Linux you will be able to change pretty much every setting, behavior, you name it, by editing text files. In Ubuntu less than in some other distros, as Ubuntu's goal is to be newbie friendly, and that leads to them making some decisions that limit control in favor of "easiness". But I don't think you'd usually notice that until you have spent a significant amount of time with Ubuntu and then other Linuxes.