Reinstalling Ubuntu while keeping the home partition intact

I've been using Ubuntu on my desktop alongside Windows 7 for a little while. I started with 11.04 and since then I have been simply upgrading it using the update manager. It worked well enough up until 12.04, I have since experienced a few problems. For instance, my sound all of a sudden stopped working on my Linux, I have had a lot of issues managing my ipod with rythmbox or banshee (which I don't tend to use since it's so buggy), my Conky now looks a bit funky and I often get errors when I try to update my distro using the software manager.

Anyway, lot's of problems. So I decided to install a fresh copy of Ubuntu 12.04 from a disk, and my main problem is that I would like to keep my /home partition intact and of course keep my Windows partitions the way they are. So this is what I have done:

1. Using a GParted live CD, I formatted my \ partition (root partition) but I left the partition as it was
2. Rebooted the machine with the Ubuntu live disk and selected the install Ubuntu option
3. Chose to do "somthing else" on the installation. There I selected my original root partition to and "changed" it to be an active partition and be used as root. You have to make sure all the Linux partitions are in Ext4.
4. Chose the original /home partition and select it as active and as the "/home" partition.
5. Chose the original /swap partition and keep it as /swap, although for this I didn't seem to need to do anything about it.

This method seems to work in terms of getting my distro installed fresh, however it did not seem to fix my sound problem, probably because the configuration information is probably located on my /home. Regardless of that, at least I have a fresh install of ubuntu now. So my next course of action will be to see if I can fix the sound issue without having to install the OS again. If that doesn't work maybe I'll install Ubuntu again and create a new /home partition. From there I could just keep my old /home partition and move the files later.