Rob, I suppose the Software Updater would work OK, but because you are skipping a step and the combo updaters seems to cause fewer problems as well as fix stuff better, I recommend you go the combo route.
I am not sure any of the following is even necessary, but being the overly cautious sort, here's what I do:
1. Make 2 back ups of anything on my HD that I would hate to lose.
2. Disable virus protection.
3. Ensure the HD is as healthy as I can make it, e.g. run fsck -y, DiskWarrior, Rebuild Permissions, and clean up/empty the cache before installing the new OS.
4. Run the updater.
5. Rebuild Permissions and then run fsck -y and DiskWarrior again to ensure the new install did not do any damage.
6. Enable virus protection.
7. While most system preferences are retained, there are at least two notable exceptions of which I am aware: In System Preferences/Software Update, the default is reset to "Automatically check for updates" and in System Preferences/General the "Number of Recent items" is reset to 10, and the Font Smoothing style is reset to "Standard." Apparently this happens on some, but not all machines.
The above routine, including DL and install, takes about 35-45 minutes.
BTW, if any of this helps, sing my praises. If, on the other hand, your machine crashes and you suffer the angst of the damned, BIOB.
Harv
[ 05-07-2003, 08:11 AM: Message edited by: pendragon ]