Questions for new SSD OS install

[Frederick N. Brier]

I am about to upgrade the motherboard and add an SSD to my Fedora 16 
system, and the options and questions are numerous.  The system should 
boot from the SSD and access the LVM partitions on the original drive 
(actually a 3Ware RAID). My system has gone through multiple Fedora 
upgrades in the last several years and with F16 I ended up trying 
Gnome3, then XFCE, and finally LXDE.  I like LXDE, but some odd 
behaviours have cropped up like the printer service vanishing or 
features that check the Network Manager to see if there is a network 
connection available.  So is this entropy or bugs?  Should I do a clean 
install or try to migrate?

My partition sizes are fine.  My first steps are fairly clear - install 
the hardware, boot with an F16 DVD, and do a basic install keeping the 
partition sizes identical on the SSD.

It is the next steps that I am unsure about.  With the upgrade route, I 
could then boot with the DVD and dd the /root partition over to the 
SSD.  I could merge the /etc/fstab on the SSD, make the old /root a 
/backup-root, but are there any gotchyas mounting the existing LVMs?  
When do the symbolic links in /dev/mapper get created and how do the 
/dev/dm-? files map to a physical drive (or RAID device)?

Or should I do a clean install of F16 and specify LXDE from the get-go.  
Are there any automated tools for getting a list of all the packages 
(perhaps after running rpmreaper) installed on the existing system and 
then feeding that into the new OS to install the same packages?  Any 
links would be helpful.  I do not need a lot of hand holding.  Please 
just point me in the right direction :).  Thank you for any help.