Reinstalling Leopard Using Erase and Install with a Cloned HD Backup

Hello. I realize there are dozens of posts related to my situation. And that is part of my problem. There seems to be so much disparate information, I can't figure out how to pull all the threads of info together.
Even if this is rehashing some old info, perhaps it's appearance in "more recent posts" will serve someone other than just me.
When I upgraded to Leopard about three months ago, I chickened out big-time at the very last second and installed the upgrade on top of Tiger. Apparently not a good idea as I'd been running Tiger on a first generation iMac Intel for about two years. (I know, I know ... I feel cowardly.) Now I have a situation where I can reboot, but very, very slowly ... it's beach ball time a great deal of the time ... and I cannot boot from the install disk to access Disk Utility for an apparently needed disk repair of some unspecified corruption. I've repaired permissions as far as I can tell, nothing else seems to work.
So ...
I've cloned my hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner ... and I'm simply considering a "clean install" of Leopard, making sure to do all OS updates before attempting to migrate anything back in or install third party apps. (I've got all of the latest versions of third party apps archived and waiting on my back-up drive.)
Is there a reliable list of what folders I can (and should) move from the back-up drive to the freshly installed OS ... to regain Apple Mail accounts and mailboxes, Airport info, iTunes, etc. Will Migration Assistant do most of this or is it a combination of that and judicious "manual" labor.
Also, unless there is some physical damage to the main hard drive, will a fresh reinstall likely take care of disk error issues ... in other words, is it likely to be that type of problem?
Please excuse the newbie-ness of all this and thanks for any help you can provide.

I am confused by how you can do a fresh install of Leopard if you cannot boot from your install disk.
In reviewing my old questions, I realized I do have an answer for this (thanks to Apple Tech Support). Because I installed Leopard over Tiger (as described in my original post), somehow the Leopard Install Disk would simply not work ... because what was still left over from Tiger was only able to recognize the Tiger Install Disk. When I dug that out and attempted it from there, it worked. So if someone else has trodden the ill-advised path I did and has the same frustration ... if you've got a Tiger/Leopard Frankenstein on the loose, perhaps trying a Tiger Install disk will help. The end of the story ... I wiped my hard drive, did a clean Leopard install and, for the most part, all is well. After installing Memory Stick to determine RAM usage, I've come to the conclusion that my routine beach balls are probably more the result of needing more than 1G of memory these days. So it's off to the Memory Store!

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