MTRECORDS

I have been sat here for hours reading through all of the many threads on Selespeed, but there seems to be so many errors i cant find the one im having. I have just brought a lovely 2001 2.0 147 (on sat) and already i have a fog light error comming up (not too much of a problem) and yesterday I started to have selespeed problems. When i was driving home from work i hit a large amount of traffic, as i was at a hault for a long period of time i put the car into neutral, only to find out that i then could not select a gear when i went to pull away. I switched off the car and back on and it sorted the problem. When i tried to go out later on last night, i started the car to find i could not select any gears, a restart once again sorted the problem out. Am i doing something wrong? I hope this is something easy to fix! please treat me as someone who knows nothing about Alfa's but im willing to learn and experiement.

Thanks in advance