Reinstall Snow Leopard, or go back to Leopard?

[zen]

When I installed Snow Leopard on my 2.4 Ghz alu iMac (4GB RAM, 500GB HDD), the installer appeared to crash. I had to pull the power, and then when I relaunched the installer it picked up from where it left off (as advertised) and finished up.

However, on this machine, Snow Leopard is noticably slower than Leopard. I get the spinning beachball a heck of a lot, and generally performance is sluggish. I've run the Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner app, but that actually seemed to make the beachballs more frequently. 10.6.1 didn't seem to make any difference. Snow Leopard also hangs quite a lot when accessing external drives (I have a USB drive for Time Machine plugged in, and I use USB pen drives quite a bit) and media (like CDs and DVDs). iTunes 9 has become completely unresponsive several times, requiring a force quit.

To top it off, as I've posted on here before, certain things like Flash performance are significantly worse than with Leopard.

I don't have any haxies, or run any CPU-hogging add-ons or background apps.

I was wondering whether I should reinstall Snow Leopard (assuming that the mid-install crash did something odd), or actually install Leopard again and wait for a major update to Snow Leopard (as the 0.0.1 update didn't do anything I noticed).

My original install was an upgrade rather than a clean install, as I have Adobe CS3 installed but the original discs are currently boxed in an inaccessible place.

However, I have heard that you can use Migration Assistant to reinstate apps after doing a clean install from Time Machine, but every time this question is asked on this forum, you get completely opposing answers!

 

[GoCubsGo]

I am going to answer from experience.

Reinstall SL, first do a complete erase of your HDD "zero out data" and then install SL. From there you CAN use migration assistant from a time machine backup to bring your apps back into the picture. I did just this and was using CS3, everything worked BUT the upgrade to SL broke my CS3 license. It was at that time I learned my license was invalid (long story not open for much discussion). So my answer is opposable but my answer is from actual experience, not a collective consumption of information found on forums.

Why is your computer slow? My guess is that while SL picked up from where it left off, no install should be interrupted and there could possibly be an issue with that install. Not enough to break the actual function of it, but enough to make your life hell.

So erase, reinstall, migrate, enjoy. SL is not so awesome that I am pissing myself in excitement, but it's quite polished (aside from the little HP network printer issue I like to call my headache).