Since it's the slow time of year, I'm taking this opportunity to finally install FCS 3.

Here's the fun part - I'm fairly certain that my current install of FCS 2 needs to be uninstalled and reinstalled. On top of that, I'm toying with re-installing Snow Leopard as well so that everything goes in clean & right. The short question is - any tips on making that a smooth & easy process? I know there's a good thread somewhere on the install process, but my search-engine mojo seems to be running low today.

If you're wondering why I'd be considering something so dramatic, here's what happened to my system. About four months ago, I got backed into a corner on a job, and basically had to do an overnight upgrade to Snow Leopard.

You can imagine how well that went. Somehow in running the disk utility on my 10.4 boot drive, I managed to completely delete the boot drive lookup table. Whoops! Not good! The solution to de-bricking my system involved installing a new internal hard drive, installing 10.4 to that drive, and re-running disk utility from the new 10.4 drive on my old 10.4 drive. Victory was achieved and the original 10.4 boot drive came back to life. I immediately made a backup clone of my 10.4 drive, then I created a new, dual-partition boot drive. I copied my clone of 10.4 to one partition (for safety), I installed Snow Leopard on the other (for the new project), and I patted myself on the back for being so smart about setting up both environments.

FCS2 got installed on Snow Leopard, and I was off and running. However, Compressor has never really worked properly under Snow Leopard. That, and the fact that I no longer need to dual-boot my system with 10.4 and 10.6 has me thinking that I'll just start over from scratch and re-install everything. I'll let the 10.4 partition live on just as a clone in my archives and just run 10.6 (after, of course, cloning my current Snow Leopard system drive so as not to repeat the goat rodeo from the last time around.)

So that's my thinking. Any thoughts on the advisability? Or tips on making it a painless (albeit time consuming) process?

You pretty much have my favorite system for upgrades. New drive, and start from scratch. I like to create a second small partition on each drive in a system and do a minimum OS install that partition. As you found, having a second bootable drive can lower the drama when you need to do disk maintenance on your boot drive. Not a bad idea to put your copies of Tech Tools and other system utilities on that drive too.

While you are about it, this is a good time to check to be sure that all your other drivers, like video card and RAID controllers are up to date. Also look for updates to your plug ins and additional software packages.

After each Apple package is installed repeatedly run Software update till it says no mas.

I like to make disk images of my software packages. If you do want those, do it before you install. Then open them all up. When you launch the FCP installer it just rips through all the installs without having to change DVDs. Only a time saver if you like having copies, but if you do keep images it really speeds the process.