About to Erase and Re-Install Snow Leopard. Anything I should know?

I'm about to erase and re-install Snow Leopard on my 2009 21.5' iMac. Something got snarled up during the migration process from my old 2006 iMac to this new one and things have been steadily getting more and more "weird" over time, so it's time for a clean slate.
I have a few specific questions and would be grateful for any other tips you may have regarding this operation as I've done it on Windoze computers many times but never done it on a Mac for obvious reasons
My specific questions are as follows:
1. If I archive my various Mail inboxes, can I just put them back after the re-install and have all my messages back again?
2. Does anyone know how to save Firefox Bookmarks, as it doesn't have an export option like Safari.
3. Any other things I should be aware of.
Your help and suggestions will be much appreciated

After what you want to do, you'll still get the same permissions repair report. Ignore it as detailed in http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448 (which doesn't include the recent JavaVM warnings).
Your bootstraps solution doesn't hold water. OK. Since the issue is specific to your original user account, you can proceed in two ways. One is to log into your test account, make a list of the preference files (plists) located in /username/Library/Preferences/, including any in the ByHost subfolder, log back into the original account, move everything on that other account's list from the original account's Preferences folder into a newly created folder on the Desktop, log out and back in, and see if the problem goes away. If so, you can copy the ones in the Desktop folder (one at time) back into /Preferences/, restart, and see if the problem returns. If so, you've identified the corrupt/conflicting one. Continue with all of them until isolating the bad ones. That'll save you the trouble of resetting preferences.
The second way is much more detailed and I'll not burden you with the steps unless the above doesn't fix the issue.

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