I use catalyst 13.1 on Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 without problems.

The most common problem with mining say litecoin is making sure the parameters on your miner are correct so you don't get corruption. Corruption being a large amount of rejected shares, or lots of hardware errors.

But you didn't actually say what problems you were having so it's hard to know what to say that would be useful and help.

Sure, gives us folks in newbie jail that can help something useful to post. I honestly don't feel like saying hi a bunch of times. But well, hi everybody 

There's no way to know if coins are lost or not just by looking at the blockchain. All a wallet is is a number (also called your private key). If you lose that number then there's no way to access those coins. But there's no way for the number to know you lost it so to speak. You know the last time the coins in the wallet moved, but lots of people put coins into "cold storage" for many months or years and yet have not lost their wallet.