Format-Reinstall procedure

OK, so I bought my mbp at the beginning of october, got Leopard, installed it, now I've had a couple of problems which have escalated into more problems. I worked w/ apple tech support and am sick of the run-around(they were actually really helpful, it just didn't solve the problem) They had me do some weird random things I don't like. So now all I want to do is format the hard drive completely and re-install leopard. All that I need to save are my pictures, music, email, and microsoft office. I haven't had my mbp long enough to download too much stuff. What is the procedure of doing all of this?

I'm new to the mac thing. I owned an HP for years up until I bought this computer

Thanks
Kyle

You could either burn what you can to disc's and reinstall the programs or do a archive and install.

The good news is that it is simple, just burn a copy of your User folder. Everything you need to survive a reformat is in your User folder. The bad news is that since everything is in your User folder there maybe some sort of evil lurking within. Here's the deal: you reformat, you reinstall, everything is fine until you migrate your User folder back in and the problems start all over again.

Just for fun, make a new User, surf the net, post on mac-forums, see if the crashes continue. If so, burn your User folder, reformat, live long and prosper. If your problems magically disappear as a new User, there may be evil in your real User folder. Which of course is a whole lot more difficult to diagnose!

ok so what exactly do I do to make this happen? What exactly do I need to burn to just save my e-mail, music, pictures and MS Office? That's really all that I need from this system. I doubt that anything nasty could be hidden in the basic things like that, but I could be wrong. So what do I do here? After I eventually burn everything do I just throw in the leopard CD and say FORMAT?

Just that, your User folder. If it is called "morris0352" then burn it! All of your bookmarks, email, etc lives in that folder. Wait a minute, though, your MS Office lives in the root Applications folder. You will need to reinstall that, but no worries, your Word/Excel files are safely in your User folder.