I've read about people doing a clean install of their OS, to clean things up and "start fresh". Maybe what I'm referring to is an archive and install. I know there is an easy way of doing this with Time Machine, but what about Tiger users?

What is the best way to re-install Tiger and preserve your documents, apps, setting, bookmarks, preferences, etc?

Everybody does this a bit differently. I use SuperDuper to create disk images off my boot drive. I usually run one right before and again right after doing updates or installing software. I keep both until the next time I do installs. Generally once I have 5 Disk images floating around I delete the oldest. This makes it easy to go back to a point where I know the OS was stable.

By keeping, critical files, photos and music on a secondary partition it keeps the OS slim enough that my back-ups are reasonably sized. It also means I can revert without losing important files. Be sure to back up Mail and address files on a regular basis if you choose this method.

Back-up time with Tiger for uncompressed disk images is about 45 minutes but would be a about an hour if Garage Band and iDVD were installed. I can revert to any of the disk images in about 10-15 minutes.

This works well for me. Recently had to revert a step after installing the latest Security, QuickTime and iTunes updates as iTunes was no longer stable. Took about 15 minutes.

You will hear many other methods as well. Mine works for me as I have GBs of Music and Photos. These get backed up as needed, independently of the OS back-up. They also get secondary back-ups to DVD. Again the older DVDs are tossed but I always have at 2 back-ups available to me both on external HD and DVD. Critical files are also backed up on a daily basis to a memory stick.

I am sure there will be several different suggestions here. Mine may be a bit extreme for your use. Pick whichever seems right to you.:)

I use SuperDuper too, to create a bootable backup (clone) on an external HD. Can I use that to do a archive and install or can I use SuperDuper to create a disk image of the HD on another external HD then run the archive and install from that?

You can boot from the clone then create a disk image of the Main HD. Big advantage to a disk image is that it does not erase the target as the target is a disk image rather than a HD partition. This makes multiple back-ups a lot easier than using clones.
NOTE: creating the disk image needs lots of free disk space. If your main HD has 10 GBs of data you will need about 21 GBs of free disk space on the Volume where the disk image will be written.

To restore from a disk image again boot from the clone. Use Disk Utility to first erase the Boot partition on the main HD and after that to restore from the disk image. Personally I have a small partition on my external. I first restore the disk image to this partition then boot from it and test just to be sure the disk image is good.

Using Terminal is considerably faster than Disk Utility. Either way you will need to go into System Prefs, and select the main HD as your start-up drive before you reboot. Alternatively use Terminal to bless the /System/Library/CoreServices folder of the restored drive.

Seems like this way of doing a clean install is just going back to a previous know stable version of my OS. I don't have that.

I do have a bootable clone, but it's cloned from the same OS that I want to replace.

What I want to do is re-install the OS (Tiger) and restore all my docs, apps (orginial and 3rd party), prefs, setting, etc. I've head of people doing this every couple of years, I was wondering how to do it.

I believe you can do this in Leopard using time machine by booting from the install disks and choosing install from previous version of time machine - how do you do this in Tiger?

Yeah, backing up and restoring isn't generally considered to be a clean install, in fact the intention of a clean install is to bring over nothing of the previous operating system, under the theory that corrupted OS files are the root of the problems you are having. So backup and restore, or TimeMachine, really is not 'clean'.

Other members will argue that there is no substitute to backing up, then reformatting a drive and installing the OS from the original DVD (customizing the install to exclude language resources and software that you don't need), then manually re-copying your account info and data only to the boot drive, copying or reinstalling application software as necessary.

But that is a tedious job. I have never had a problem with using the built in "Archive and install" option in the OSX installer. By all means back up first.
But then Archive and Install leaves your data and your account information in place, and replaces just the OS files, then restores your account(s) and the System resources for your applications to the new OS, all in one go. It is far easier than doing it manually, and except in cases of extreme corruption, I have found it entirely satisfactory.

I've generally just used a clean install on a freshly formatted disk and then used Migration Assistant to copy the info that I'm looking for. I personally keep my media files off of my internal drives as well.

If you have the space, you can also set up a partition to clone your install DVD to on an external drive. This allows for much faster installation of the OS than from the optical media... however, it requires you to always have that partition ready with the cloned installation DVD.

Everyone's backup and reformatting styles are different.. Just ensure that you have all of your media and important data backed up and you can't go wrong. Even if you have to copy it manually, you'll certainly not lose anything in the process. :)

Install Tiger on your formated drive then use Migration Assistant to import your data from your SuperDuper clone. Then do the 10.4.11 software update.