So essentially, "Upgrade" Installs Suck...A Lot?

So I did an upgrade install of Leopard and well...a month later it sucks. Even more so than when I first installed it. Tiger was so much faster it makes me cry. I'll be re-installing Leopard over Christmas Break (next weekend and what not) so that SHOULD make Leopard run faster, right? I'll be doing a clean install of Leopard and then Vista as well. It's not just Leopard that sucks, right? It's just the fact that I did the upgrade install?

Could this fix all my issues that I'm having with my FireWire external drive not mounting properly? I have already tried so many things it's rediculous. Resetting PRAM, taking out battery for 30 minutes, taking out battery overnight, reformatting the drive (when it finally mounted!) to Mac Journaled instead of the FAT that it had before. It's now partitioned ~220GB Mac Journaled and ~30GB FAT. Sometimes only the FAT partition mounts which is pretty ironic. Will the reformat POSSIBLY fix this issue?

Anything I have to do besides insert my Leopard disk and reboot? Do I just re-install over the current partition I have? Is a format or a secure format (all 0's) needed?

To put it bluntly, yes, Upgrade pretty much sucks. Archive & Install and Clean Install are the way to go. I did a clean install on my machine and Archive & Installs on my siblings' Macs, and Leopard has been great for all of us.

I have never had a single problem with using the "Upgrade" option.
I have used it for all versions of OS X.
Works like a charm every time.

Yeah, I did the upgrade on both my machines. The only glitch I have is my airport disk not mounting properly on my MBP...I have to relaunch Finder occasionally. Otherwise everything flies.