This is more of me letting off steam then looking for answers, maybe someone else has also run into this....
I've been coding a new custom module. As always I start on paper, diagramming relationships and functionality. I'm at the second stage where I'm translating this into code. Since I'm all for Jquery these days I decided to use jquery tabs (which are very nice and simple to implement). Now since my tabs will have a lot of code, I'll set them up with ajax. All fine till here. Now on one of my ajaxed pages I've setup some further javascript. Strangely no javascript runs from these loaded pages. If I setup the javascript on the first page loaded it works fine. Well a couple of minutes of googling quickly provides me with the answer; once a page has been completly loaded and DOM assembled, nothing else gets interpreted....damn... and I was looking forward to jquery tabs. Certainly someone else has run into this, I thought. So back to google and a fix appears; livequery() (a jquery plugin). After spending a good part of an afternoon trying to get this all to work, I'm about to quit this method and use the more prosaic approach of one tab-one page. Hey, it's not cutting edge but works great for my particular module.
My question to you all is: how long do you struggle with a solution before you try an alternative?

4-5 hours normally

Oh, I hate the alternatives! ;)
Most of time I spend thinking of what the solution to select or switching between the different alternatives all the time. Not struggle in coding, only struggle in thoughts... I hate it! ;)