FGLRX Sadness

I was reminded once again of why other people give up on linux when I walked over to my new desktop only to find that the 3d graphics driver, fglrx, had decided not to work. I spent several hours over the next few days trying to track down the issue, uninstalling, reinstalling, reverting to older versions of the driver, xserver, the linux kernel, all to no avail. Eventually, I gave up and am now using the 2d open source drivers. The fglrx driver had even stopped working adequately for simple window management things.