G4 PPC won't Sleep, Restart, or run Screen Saver

Hi all,
My 7 year old 1.25 GHz G4 PPC, until recently, has run with little to almost no problems (at least nothing I couldn't solve on my own).
Now, this past week all of a sudden I can't get the computer to go to sleep, either through Energy Saver settings or manually. It just doesn't respond and nothing happens. I read through some other similar questions that have been posted in the past and tried a few of the offered solutions. I've run disk utility, and tried disconnecting all USB peripherals, still non-responsive.
Likewise, I can't get my screen saver to run either through Energy Saver settings or through my Hot Corners (all other hot corner settings seem to work fine). It will only launch through System Prefs > Desktop & Screen Saver > Test.
The last problem I have noticed so far is that I can't perform a restart, when I do the process starts, but almost immediately goes to a grey screen with the little spinning circle (the one that looks like a clock face) and stays that way. I've let this screen run for as long as about a half hour to see if something would happen, and nothing did. In the end I have to force a power down by holding down the power button.
Again, as recommended elsewhere, I have repaired disk permissions and verified the disk, with still no change. I have disconnected all usb peripherals (3 external HD's, iPod, powered usb hub, despite the fact it's worked fine for the past 6 months with all these connections [6 months ago my firewire 400 ports stopped working, haven't replaced them yet]). I have not installed any new software recently, and my last software update before this started happening was iTunes 8.2.1 a couple of days before I first noticed the problem.
Any ideas?

Hi japamac,
Thanks for the tips. (I had to create a new account here).
Tried all your advice and nothing worked. I ended up getting fed up and tried reinstalling OSX and that didn't work either. After that I zeroed my drive (twice) and started from scratch. That's why I've been late in responding, it takes forever to backup your system when all you have to work with are usb ports at 12kb/s.
Anyway, upon completion of zeroing my HD I reinstalled OSX 10.3 and checked all my settings, no issues were apparent, I could put the computer to sleep, run my screensaver, and all hot corners worked as well, all with no apparent problems. After that I downloaded and installed all updates for OSX 10.3, and still everything worked fine. So next I reinstalled OSX 10.4 off my disk, and once again, everything worked fine. So I started with my software updates (just the basics) one at a time retesting after each one, Java updates: everything worked, iPod phone support: everything worked, DVD Player update: everything worked, then I updated the 10.4 update bundle to 10.4.11 and all the problems returned. So I started over one more time, this time updating OSX first, and still, as soon as 10.4 is updated to 10.4.11 the problems return.
So what could be happening with my computer that an operating system update (one I've had and run since it first came out, with no previous problems), is all of a sudden causing some sort of conflict or is just buggered in general, even after I have erased and zeroed my HD twice (presumably deleting any other file/program that could have been causing the conflict in the first place).
And because I erased my HD, all my login settings for this forum were gone and I couldn't remember my login info so I had to create a new account.
Thanks again,
Chris

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