I agree that a clean install is the way to go - I never bother with an
upgrade anymore, but simply save the important stuff, keep a separate
/home partition and do a clean install.

Your symptoms seem very odd though. For me, 9.10 has been superior to
9.04 in every way.

Looking at your fstab, I have to wonder if some of your problems are
self inflicted. Why did you choose a barebones, non-journalled
filesystem for /, yet choose the slowest, journalled filesystem for /var
and /tmp? Seems backwards.

The fact that you have to do an fsck every time you power up sounds like
you are turning off the power without a proper shutdown of the system -
either that, or the disk is going bad.

FWIW, I've been using reiserfs for years, but I use ext2 for /boot, and
I've used ext4 on new test machines, but ext3 is out, I won't use it
because I don't want the performance hit.