Just updated to Ubuntu 12.04 and cgminer 2.4.3 and I've got good news and bad news. Good news is that I'm able to use 2 threads per GPU again and cgminer's CPU usage is way down. Bad news is that somehow it looks like SDK 2.6 got installed along the way. Lost about 60 MH/s.

Any decent guides on downgrading SDKs out there so I don't mess up my Ubuntu install again?
I managed to get MH/s back on 12.04 by copying from a Gentoo system (where I forced x11-drivers/ati-drivers to <= 11.6) the phatk kernel and forcing cgminer to use it by giving it "--kernel phatk -w 256" which is the setting used on the "good" system.
As I mix 7970 and 5xxx I think there's no other way to get good hashing speeds for all cards. I don't know if there are lost MH/s still (I didn't take the time to compare the 2 systems with 2 similar cards and same settings) but you may try this hack too, cgminer complains about phatk being inefficient but as it reuses the bin file it is indeed more efficient than any other combination it can build with the drivers installed on 12.04.
Anyway if anyone has a step-by-step procedure to downgrade the ati drivers on Ubuntu 12.04, I'm interested too