Do the software updates for 10.04 right away....after I installed 10.04 on my notebook, it also froze up. When I managed to login and get the updater going, everything was fine after the reboot.
vnstat is a nice simple command line program to monitor the b/w in/out on all interfaces. You can also get a php web frontend for it -> http://www.sqweek.com/sqweek/index.php?p=1
It splits usage by day, month, year, etc and can also rank days by usage.