wanting to reinstall osx 10.7

I've got the newest macbook pro 17 with osx 10.7 and I think I've got some bad kernel stuff. I'd like to reinstall from scratch (apple-R), then bring back all but the program that modify the kernel. any suggestions on how to do that?

thanks

Please explain what you mean by "bad kernel stuff". Did you install some program that's causing problems? Are you receiving any errors?

You can reinstall Lion by booting to the Recovery partition (command + R).

I'm assuming that OSX is like unix in that certain applications require a new kernel to be benerated based on the necesity of driver changes. Most apps don't need to relink or modify the kernel (not sure relink or simply dynamic boot time additions).

I'm having about one crash a day. The crash always points at programs like chrome that don't have any non-protected code so I'm assuming it can't actually be the culprit.

What I'm hoping to be able to do is reload (commond + R), then use my time machine backup to restore just programs that don't cause things to be changed at a kernel level.

So, the errors are crash logs. Hard non-recoverable crash logs.

(The two programs I'd like to leave behind that I did install at one time are Parallels and VirtualBox. I believe both of those install there own drivers in the kernel)

You can reload Lion (10.7) as you've suggested with holding down command+R to boot to the recovery partition.

It is a straight forward process, just boot up to the recovery partition, erase the HDD and reinstall.

If you've got a time machine back up disk connected to your machine, the OS will detect this and ask if you want to restore it after the OS has been reloaded.
A fresh install + using time machine to restore your data is the best way to go.

any way to selectively restore programs with there settings?

You can select specific apps to restore from time machine.
Maybe, first you might want to try restoring the apps that you think are causing the issue, if they were working properly and not causing a kernel panic at a previous time.

You can use time machine to restore individual apps.