Sluggish system

[cknipe at savage.za.org]

Hi,

I've got a beasty box that has served its purpose for many years.  Some files
dates back to over 6 years ago when this old trusty and faithfull was pulled
into service.

Recently however, I've started to pick up rather strange problems with the
system.  Libraries installed from ports, startup scripts, and egneral weird
things started happening with the system and the installed applications.

I've made a backup of my /usr/local/etc, would it be a 'clean' way to rm -rf
/usr/local, clean the package database, and then basically reinstall everything
I need (and remove things I don't need) on the system?

I guess, my aim is a clean 'remote' installation, without physically
reinstalling the base OS... 

Thanks,
Chris