Virtualmin/Webmin dying, one service at a time

I'm running Debian etch and Virtualmin Pro.

Mail once almost worked, once, even though I never got pop to work and there were some problems sending mail. Now supposedly nothing ever created via virtualmin appears in the virtual alias table (even when it apparently does appear in virtual alias tables) and so nothing is deliverable.

Then Bind no longer ran, according to Virtualmin/Webmin, with an "unknown error", except that one can grep named.pid, and connect to websites, and it was possible to find new subdomains that were created via webmin in named.conf.local and in subdomain.host, and connect to them. I managed to convince Webmin that Bind really does exist by pointing it at the pid, but still it's impossible to manage anything via Webmin's Bind module.

Now some of those domains have disappeared off the map, for reasons unknown. No changes were made in any of the config files, and the affected domains are registered, but they can't be pinged. One of the disappearing domains was the server domain itself: the two nameservers are alive (ns1.theprojectserver.org and ns2.theprojectserver.org), but "theprojectserver.org" itself has disappeared. Disappearing domains for no apparent reason is a tad bit unnerving.

Then updates stopped working with "unknown error". There were no apparent problems upgrading via command line.

I'm not sure that Virtualmin/Webmin are performing any function other than, at best, to complicate debugging problems, and at worst to create problems.

Do any of these problems sound familiar to anyone? Is there any solution to this situation short of giving up in favor of command line or asking my hosting company to reinstall everything including plesk?