iMac hanging on Office 2001 startup, rhythmic clicking sound coming from back

[Spike Spiegel]

This post probably covers a few topics, but I figured the hardware issue is the most worrying. I upgraded my mother's intel iMac from 10.4 to 10.6.8 with no difficulties, but when I tried to launch Entourage 2001, it prompted me to install Rosetta since it's a PPC program, I imagine. This worked, and Entourage opened, until the next time she tried it, when it hung on the splash screen. As it hung there, there was a rhythmic pair of clicks that sounded every ten seconds or so coming from the back of the machine. I force quit it, then restarted, and heard the clicks again at startup, but it booted fine, and I haven't heard them at startup since. My question is, am I able to either do something that would enable me to open Entourage again, or alternatively recover her contacts and email through a new version of Office? I have a copy of Office 2008 I can install on her machine.
Thanks
-Chris

 

[hideous cheese]

That kind of clicking is often associated with a failing hard drive. Back everything up and be ready to get a new HDD

 

[Spike Spiegel]

When I boot from the system disk and check the disk in Disk Utility, it finds no problems. Is there any way I could install Office 2008 and preserve the User Data File from the old version of Entourage?