Ubuntu Freeze/Crash, Broken Pipe, Compiz All at same time

I give up, I have no idea what's going on here.

PROBLEM:

 1. My puter is crashing frequently, and it is running very slow, my CPU is operating at 100% when browsing, and I have a very crappy DSL connection (Frontier advertises 3 Meg,. When they check they admit 1.5K, my experience it is under 200K. & speed test sites show around 800K) This is an FYI as I don't know how much this may affect the primary problems.

 2.Then I started seeing a message at startup just before the gnome desktop loaded:
“could not write bytes: broken pipe”

 3.Then closely followed by this “compiz” crashing problem.

All three of these events occurred within a couple of weeks of each other.

Also, as long as I'm throwing smelly stuff at the wall, to much is sticking. FireFox did a major upgrade then Ubuntu did a big upgrade, then something else happened. then items 1., 2., and 3. above occured.

I have no clue as to wether these events are related or which one to fix first.

I started researching the problems above here at the Forums website, and found out I waasn't alone. I found quite a few people suggesting dumping FireFox and installing Chrome. I didn't dump FireFox, but I stopped using it (I know that's not the same). What I noticed, probably all wrong, but ths CPU cycles--both prosessors, dropped about 25%, but my RAM was maxed out and my swap jumped 49%. Then my brain started going into orbit.

I started with Ubuntu and ver 10 and I was quite happy. Then, and then, I started with 12.04 aronnd Aug-Sep 2013. I have been unhappy since then. But I'm not a cry-baby.

MY SYSTEM:

UBUNTU
Release 12.04 (precise) 32-bit
Kernel Linux 3.13.0-32-generic
GNOME 3.4.2

HARDWARE
Memory: 1001.5 MiB
Processor: Intel® Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.60GHz × 2
System Status: Available disk space: 75.7 GiB

VIDEO CARD
taraba@HP-XP-Desktop:~$ /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on ATI RV350
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 10.1.3
and “yes” answers to 11 more questions.

I also ran the more lengthy:
taraba@HP-XP-Desktop:~$ sudo lshw -C display; lsb_release -a; uname -a; apt-cache policy compiz
*-display:0
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: RV350 [Radeon 9550/9600/X1050 Series]
       vendor: Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics)
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: 00
       width: 32 bits
       clock: 66MHz
       capabilities: agp agp-3.0 pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=radeon latency=64 mingnt=8
       resources: irq:16 memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:a800(size=256) memory:fe9f0000-fe9fffff memory:fe9c0000-fe9dffff --- shortened.

I hope I wasn't too verbose here,

Thanks Joe