Messed up Ubuntu, again

I've not been having great luck with Ubuntu recently. Two weeks ago I tried an upgrade and failed miserably (see thread). I was able to backup and essentially reinstall from CD and start all over (which isn't all that hard with Synaptic, it's just click and install and rsync to recover my 45 gig backup).

Well ain't that precious		You'll notice that there are no window borders and the console is actually on top of the panel at the top of the screen.
Then this week I was playing with vnc2swf and somehow I killed my window manager. Basically, my machine would start up but had no borders around the window, they are unmovable and I can't Alt-Tab to different programs. I 'knew' the problem was with the window manager, but what is that called, and how do I set it up properly? At first I thought it was GDM (the GNOME Display Manager) , but after fiddling with that for a bit I realized (eventually) that I was wrong. Some more surfing and I realized that it is probably metacity (although that page didn't really jump to me and say "this is what you're missing"). On a lark, I typed "metacity" at the command line, and lo and behold, it worked! I've got windows, that I can move and resize! Unfortunately, I have to do this every time I reboot, anybody know where this is setup?

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