Quick Background: iMac G5 (the white one; 4 years old?) Running Leopard 10.5.something. Time Machine started failing on me; and every time I touch the Finder, things beachball like crazy. Booting from install disk then using Disk Utility to "Repair Disk" also fails. I'm left with the conclusion that I have a corrupt file somewhere important, that's (i) keeping TM from working and (ii) messing with basic functionality. I am not (yet) savvy enough in OS X to know what logs to look in, or how to decipher them - but 'corrupt file' seems to be the likely case, based on my readings of apple.com forum threads. So I think I need to backup, outside of Time Machine, then install fresh OS X on a new drive (or maybe SpinRite the current drive?). I'm able to put a (non-Time Machine) external USB drive on, so I dragged all 3 Users' folders to that... am I done backing up? Am I going to have a massive Permissions problem, trying to put things back together after a re-install? Thanks for reading.