I do that a lot less than I used to, but you perfectly describe many an evening for me.
Well, it might be because I just got Mepis 3.4, and I always have to go through and see what all the new apps do. The other night, I spent hours reorganizing my music collection with Amarok. Also, as I said, have done a lot of tweaking on the GUI with kbfx and mtaskbar, which both make things look very cool. And, I'm starting to play around with Kino a little to edit videos. There's enough software there to keep me busy for months.