Roger,
Got a few of things for you to try. In Chirp, hit Help then About. It should give you a popup with CHIRP daily-2012mmdd. If you get CHIRP 0.2.3 so something similar, you have the stable version and not the daily. You probably want the daily.
Did you install Chirp from source on your Ubuntu machine? While updating the Chirp LiveCD, I discovered a problem with updating via the ppa. That is, since I had done a manual install of Chirp from source, when I updated via the ppa, it would tell me that the most recent version had been installed, but when I tried to open it, the old version would open. The fix was removing the manually installed version. I deleted everything Chirp related from /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages. Then Chirp would open the the new version that I installed via the ppa.
Make sure you have the correct repository in your /etc/apt/sources.list or /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dansmith-chirp-snapshots-precise.list. One of the two files should have the following lines: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/dansmith/chirp-snapshots/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/dansmith/chirp-snapshots/ubuntu precise main
If all else fails, download the Chirp liveCD, use UNetbootin to write it to a USB flash drive and mess around with things. Chirp works and properly updates from the ppa. And, best of all, if you mess it up, simply format the USB drive and write it again. (instructions are located in the wiki of the site below)
sourceforge.net/projects/chirplivecd/
The liveCD can even be installed to the hard drive as a fully functional operating system if you desire. I intentionally didn't make it obvious since I don't want people bricking their windows install. It is relatively easy especially if you have prior Linux experience. If you decide to do that, email me directly and I'll suggest a couple of tweaks that will make the hard drive install better.
(the other) Bob