Upgraded to snow leopard, now browsing SLOW can I reinstall?

Question

I wasn't having any real problems with Leopard, but when Chrome stopped updating flash for it, I decided what the heck, I'll upgrade (against my better judgement). 
So, I ordered my Snow Leopard disk directly from apple.  Backed up my Mac with Carbonite. Then installed SL on my Mac.  At one point it hung up, but after I eventually decided to shut off the computer and restart it, everything appeared fine. I also ran all the updates so my safari is 5.1.7 and my SL is 10.6.8.
Here is my system info: (I  replaced the s/n with the ****)
Model Name:          iMac
  Model Identifier:          iMac8,1
  Processor Name:          Intel Core 2 Duo
  Processor Speed:          2.8 GHz
  Number Of Processors:          1
  Total Number Of Cores:          2
  L2 Cache:          6 MB
  Memory:          2 GB
  Bus Speed:          1.07 GHz
  Boot ROM Version:          IM81.00C1.B00
  SMC Version (system):          1.30f1
  Serial Number (system): ************
  Hardware UUID:          *************
Browsing has become horribly slow.  I'm always getting the beach ball, and it Chrome and Safari keep becoming nonresponsive.  I didn't realize I was supposed to do a REPAIR DISK BEFORE my upgrade.  I have run REPAIR DISK several times now. I heard that there were a handful of items that would repeatedly show up as needing to be repaired, even though they are actually ok, BUT I just ran a repair disk AGAIN and there must have been 150 line items to repair.  It said it would take 39 minutes. But it actually took about 15. 
I realized that "rosetta" was not selected when I installed (but I don't run any windows programs anyway).  Also, once when I got hung up in Safari, I was in the Zynga gaming site and multiple windows started showing up telling me to run in 32 bit mode. I tried changing to 32 bit (even though it didn't seem to make sense because I'm not running anything that would require  32 bit) but it made no difference.  I've since returned it to 64.
So I'm wondering, Can I REINSTALL Snow Leopard?  Since I've done a repair disk again, can I just stick the disk in and try to install like normal? Do I have to back anything off?  I've had my Mac for years, but NEVER had any problems with it, and never had to upgrade so this is new to me.  (I was used to Microsoft before, that caused me problems CONSTANTLY, especially needing to upgrade constantly.
BTW, I don't have a LOT of different docs stored on my Mac, just a ton of pictures (which was my reason for needing to make sure it was all backed up). 
Thanks for any help. I really appreciate it.  I would like to be able to browse without having to FORCE QUIT every 10 minutes.

Answer 1

I've done multiple safari resets.  I've also repaired permissions multiple times.  So here's what I've done. I did another disk permission repair, then put the snow leopard disk back in and ran the install again.  It acted a little odd, for example in the middle of the install the computer shut down and started up again on its own.  I just left it.  Then, it seemed to be stuck on 1 minute left for a solid 20 minutes, but eventually I got messages that it finished. Then, after doing a repair again I noticed safari was reset back to 4.0, so I ran all the other upgrades. Did repairs between each. 
I also noticed that Flash player wasn't upgraded to current, so I did that. 
So safari wants to take a while to open now when I click it.  I usually get a beach ball.  Also happening with Chrome. 
I play 2 games on Zynga, and have since discovered that I can't play one of them (rubyblast) anymore because it the brower (doesn't matter if its firefox, chrome or safari) lags. 
Is there some way for me to see how much memory these games require, and if that could be my problem?  I honestly don't know much about Mac memory.  I don't have many applications installed except for what came iwth my computer 4 years ago.  I do have a HUGE number of pictures on my mac though (and since iphoto duplicates those pictures, I have nearly double). 
Am I missing something?  I didn't want to upgrade from Leopard because my Mac ran just fine. I only did so because Chrome dropped support for it.  I like using chrome occasionally.
If someone can help I'd appreciate it. I have 3 days left on a carbonite trial (which isn't enough time to restore my Mac if I need to) so I'd like to think I'm just missing a common thing.