Will flushing the buffer and changing the baud rate help if I choose to send bytes?
No. Flushing the buffer, in the pre-1.0 sense of dumping random amounts of unread data, hardly seems like a good idea. Flushing the buffer, in the post-1.0 sense of blocking until the outgoing buffer is empty, hardly seems useful.
Changing the baud rate won't affect noise, poor connections, etc. that are the general cause of serial data corruption/loss.