Best way to repair a corrupt installation

Hello,
I am trying to fix a problem for a non-technical friend, and I'm fairly new to the Mac myself, so I thought that it would be safest to ask for advice before I begin. It looks like I'm going to have to reinstall the OS, and since my friend can't find the disks for most of her 3rd party software, and she is unsure about her Mac disks, I'd like to try to preserve as much of her old installation as possible. She does have a Time Machine backup on an external drive.
Here is the problem. My friend has a Macbook Pro running Leopard with all updates installed. Safari has suddenly stopped working for her. It appears to launch (the menu bar appears), but no window opens. If she tries to close Safari, an error message appears saying something like "Do you really want to close Safari? 0 tabs are open." Her Safari preferences seem fine, except when I look at plug-ins. For every string in the plug-ins panel there is a message saying "Localized string not found". Her plug-ins folder is empty (I deleted it anyhow, but it didn't help). I uninstalled Safari, deleted her preferences folder, and downloaded and installed a fresh copy, but this didn't help. I did not look at "/library/Internet Plug-Ins", but I'll do so before doing anything more drastic. The folks at the Apple store scratched their heads over this one, but couldn't figure it out. Their recommendation is to reinstall the OS.
So, since she doesn't have everything she needs for a complete reinstall, what is the best way to recover the system with minimum disruption? She has bought a Snow Leopard upgrade, and I'm tempted to just give that a try to see if it fixes the problem. However, I've always believed that upgrading a system with known problems is just asking for more problems.
I thought of trying an archive and install, assuming my friend can find her original disk (or that the Snow Leopard upgrade DVD will let me do this).
This should preserve her preferences, but does it preserve installed applications? I believe that I could use Magration Assistant and get applications back from Time Machine. I have made a Time Machine backup of the system, and I'll probably do a disk image as well before I start.
The safest thing would be an erase and install, but I'm not sure that the Snow Leopard upgrade DVD will permit this. I do have my old Tiger disk from my own Macbook Pro if she can't find her installation disks; I could do a clean Tiger install and then upgrade to Snow Leopard I suppose. I assume that if I did this, I could then pull everything she'll need from Time Machine. Is this correct?
I'd appreciate any suggestions.

If you have a bootable backup (this would be a clone and safer than TM -- use free Carbon Copy Cloner or "Restore" from Disk Utility), you don't have too much to risk, since you can always reverse clone back to the Mac. Just install Snow Leopard over the current Leopard by selecting the upgrade option. Everything should still be there and I would think it would install all the correct files for its version of Safari.
Then use Software Update to see what needs updating, but run those updates separately, _or much better,_ download the standalones from Apple Downloads. You should update the OS either to the current 10.6.6 (if you don't mind having the App Store welded to your system) or to 10.6.5 using the Combo updates. The 10.6.6 has only one minor security patch and there's no emergency to install it right now.
10.6.5 Combo
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1324
10.6.6 Combo
http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1349
10.6 system requirements. (More than 1GB RAM preferable)
-Mac computer with an Intel processor
-1GB of memory
-5GB of available disk space
-DVD drive for installation
Or just reapply the 10.5.8 Combo, which may fill in and fix the corrupted Safari files. (Personally, I would go with the 10.6 upgrade.) Verify and if necessary repair the disk and then repair Permissions before running any update or upgrade.
http://support.apple.com/downloads/MacOS_X_10_5_8_ComboUpdate
Message was edited by: WZZZ

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