Installation Failed Bad File Bad Media in an Older MacBook Pro 15" solution

Question

I have two MBP's. One is a very early model, 15". One is a recent 17" model. Each meet the specifications for Leopard. I originally upgraded both computers to Leopard in December and things went well. Over the next month I felt that I needed to reinstall and waited for SuperDuper! to be released supporting OSX 10.5 so that I could back up my system first. I did the clean install on my newer 17" MBP first with no problems but the older 15" continually failed saying that the media was bad (which, obviously it was not).
Now I have seen a number of postings on this site related to this issue and I thought I would put in my two cents. The advice has ranged from cleaning the disk to removing memory and while these may be options perhaps you should consider that the DVD drive is not handling the install properly. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately I discovered early on that some of the early 15" MBP's had some major issues with the DVD drives. In fact, I had to replace mine. I suspected that (as I am sure others may have suggested somewhere) that although the replaced DVD drive for the old MBP seemed to be working ok with burning a disk or two, that it was not up for something like copying an entire OS.
I was correct. The media was not bad. The DVD drive is still a problem, at least at this level of operation.
I used my 17" MBP to perform the install on the older 15" MBP. I connected the 15" by firewire 400 to the 17" MBP and started the 15" up holding the "T" to put it in targeted drive mode while the 17" was already on. Then I inserted the Leopard install disk into the 17" and restarted. I ran the install, selecting the HD of the 15" as the destination. Everything worked perfectly. When it rebooted I could even follow the setup utility (network, .mac etc) using the 17" as a terminal for the 15" hard drive. Shut down each and restart. Perfect.
I hope this helps anyone with a similar problem.
Cheers

Answer 1

That crash appears to be casued by the Facebook plug-in.
Create a new account (systempreferences -> accounts or Users & Groups on 10.7 and 10.8), make a new Library in that account, import some shots  and see if the problem is repeated there. If it is, then a re-install of the app might be indicated. If it's not, then it's likely the app is okay and the problem is something in the main account.