Smooth install on a clean drive.
Downloaded and installed 9.10 onto a fresh HDD on a few year old Tosh Equium laptop.
Absolutely no problems at all - in fact the Avant Window Manager works on this release whereas it didn't on 9.04 (which is why I tried out the Win7 RC for a few months instead - something to do with incompatible graphics).
I now have 9.10 running with VMWare installed with Win7 for those pgm's that I can't do without.
Very happy with 9.10 &, it could just be me but, I do think it's noticeably quicker. Sorry to hear that so many others are having problems.