going back to snow leopard from mavericks

So, like a moron, I decided to upgrade my 2008 24" iMac from snow leopard to Mavericks. After all, Apple's updates make shit run faster (or, at least, have done in the past, and I've been doing OSX since the DP). Step one was to go to Mountain Lion. 29 bucks later, I had a mac that ran like shit. So, get myself 4GB of memory, find one chip is dead (the dangers of second user memory). and a 3GB mac that sorta ran acceptably. hrm. Mavericks, then. A fuxking huge download and install, and, again, a mac. that runs like shit. Beachball frenzy. Of course, this is the point at which my time machine disk decides to die. Now, my time machine disk is not formatted as a single volume, but has a bunch of extra stuff on a now inaccessible volume. Crap. time to pull out ddrescue, at least to recover that extra stuff. ddrescue is the number 1 go-to tool for recoveribg data, it's free, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It took 7 passes to do its thing, but I have my data back. Next up is to try and get my external disk to come back to life. More ddrescue, copying /dev/zero to the freshly partitioned disk. 750gb takes a bit of time, good job I'm off work with a sciatica (2 injections ov valium & profenid per day, makes life more or less tolerable). I will, of course, blame spalling pisstakes, grandmatikal erorz and other crap on being drugged out of my tiny box, as well as entering this on an iphone's poxy osk. next step. export contacts and diary entries from Mavericks. then clone the internal disk to the external drive, and disconnect the fucker. Boot 10.5 from the original disks (my 10.6 DVD won't even boot with Mavericks installed) and reformat the internal disk to zero. Install 10.5 and restore the 'original' extras, upgrade to 10.6, then manually restore all my data from the external drive (importing the stuff Mavericks has shat all over). And then. Recompiling my 5 cross-deveopment toolkits. yes, I'm a happy bunny. Not