Maintenance

do you think it's necessary to do a clean install of leopard every now and again?

i wanna make sure my hd space isn't being wasted with garbage files.

OS X actually does a pretty good job of keeping itself well maintained. It doesn't suffer from OS rot over time the way Windows does. My copy of OS X has been running just as strong now as it has been since I upgraded to Leopard when it first came out almost two years ago.

If you're really paranoid about garbage files, then you can download programs like Onyx or MainMenu and use them to get rid of caches and various temporary files.