To be honest, thats both the pleasure and the pain of Linux. A lot of things just work and often considerably better than windows equivelents, but every now and again you need to get your hands dirty and delve into the guts of the thing.
Best advice I can give you is what you are already doing, ask on the forums
There used to be a chap called Mpemba Effect who posted a lot on the OCUK linux forums who helped me a lot, and although I still only really play with Linux, I can do most of what I need to do now and have a home linux server that file serves, torrents, is a teamspeak server, and ftp server and hopefully soon will be come a TV tuner farm using Myth TV (thats my next project).
All I can say is stick with it, theres many a time when I got frustrated and didn't want to play anymore, but I'm glad I did.
I've always used fedora, and must say there are certain things about Ubuntu which I find a bit non-linux like. Yes its an easy distro to start with, but I'd suggest you look at Fedora also.
E-I