restore question
 

I have a doubt that I need to clear up. (I will try to be brief).

I have a couple of apps I use a lot that for some reason have stopped opening on Snow Leopard. I have done a permission repair with Disk Utility, uninstalled and reinstalled them, etc. but nothing seems to fix the problem.

I am thinking of doing a clean reinstall of Snow Leopard to see if that fixes things after backing up with SD.

When I do a restore from my external HD, will that reinstall the original OS as well? If so, my plan will probably not work. I would like to clear this up before going to all the trouble.

Thanks for any help on this.

A regular reinstall of Snow Leopard, from your DVD, will put down a fresh copy of the OS and leave your data/applications in place.

In general, though, it's a better idea to figure out what's really wrong. Have you tried simple thing, like starting up in "Safe Boot" (Shift at power on all the way to the desktop)?