I don't know what went wrong with your installation and you don't say if
both OS's are on one hard drive or two but I think that your statement
that Ubuntu is not for the average user who carefully follows
instructions is a rather sweeping one. I am a total newbie to all things
Linux but, in the last two months, I have set up a dual-boot with XP and
HH, then added Kubuntu into a multi-boot setup, then started afresh with
XP and Mint, then added Mepis into the mix (with grub on the Mepis
partition) and then finally repartitioned my second hard drive to remove
Mepis and give all the space to Mint! The only part that was a bit
problematic was restoring grub to Mint but with a bit of advice from the
forums, the live CD and ten minutes work that was soon achieved.

At each stage I carefully followed instructions and each time the
various Linux installations behaved impeccably. Although I am a fairly
competent XP user, I'm certainly no power user and, as I said, a total
newbie to command lines, terminals (an unfortunate term really, if you
happen to kill your installation!!) etc.

I'm pretty sure that if you post some further details of your setup and
what has gone wrong, someone will be able to point you in the right
direction.