@sbe07862 Hi Scott, as far as I know, the only way to disable Pie Menus, is to go to Edit > Preferences > Keymap and on the top, change it from Blender to Blender 27X.
To select objects in Wireframe mode, you need to be on, or near a wire/edge/vertex.
For the rest: do you have the official version (not some old daily build)? (Might try uninstalling and re-downloading from Blender.org…)
Is (especially) your graphics card driver up to date? (Actually, this is the first thing you should check!)
Hope this helps…
