What to do?

I use windows right now but really would like to use ubuntu, I have before, and what made me go back is I couldn't get ventrilo to work with wine because my soundcard was fail.

So I recently picked up a new soundcard, and JUST MAYBE think it will work this time.

People have gotten ventrilo to work with this none-fail card so I have hope

The only games I play are UT CSS and WoW, although UT runs natively on linux, I'm worried that I won't be able to get steam to work.

should I waste time trying to get all of this to run, or just sit pretty with my windows?

You can use things like cygwin if you just want a linux emulation within windows.  Used that a lot for compiling using gcc, since I had a backwards instructor that only used it.