Need to reinstall Lion on 24" iMac

my wife has '09 24" imac (3.06ghz/gt130/4gb/1tb) operating snow leopard. after installing lion, has become unstable. freezes requiring reboot, , kernel panic gray screen. i'm thinking it's possible when upgrade occurred, didn't install correctly.

reinstall lion fresh on machine. don't want lose data, has hundreds of gb worth of photos/music/documents. i'm tempted wipe time machine disk , fresh backup before attempt reinstall.

process doing this? i'm afraid if use migration assistant , allow reload time machine restore whatever causing problem in first place. object have fresh copy keep data.

thoughts?

 

anyone? bueller?

 

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