IPhoto 5.04 crashing after startup

Question

I've had the worst luck with iPhoto in the last year.
6 months ago iPhoto wouldn't load the pictures. Had to do the whole reimporting of my entire photo library. This obviously increased my photo count since it counts edited images as another image.
Then it happened again a month ago. I had backed the various important files up on an external drive 2 weeks prior when I last used iPhoto, but I had to use that drive for something else and hadn't gotten around to backing it up. So I had to re-import everything... again. This time my photo count almost doubled with all the doubles I hadn't fixed. It was at 11,000 photos last I remember.
When all was done, I started going through everything and spent many many hours deleting over a thousand, maybe 2000, of those doubles, triples and quadrupled photos.
And then MacOS X crashed one day. I get these horrible crashed where the screen dims and the text comes up. No idea what's causing it, I dont have the time to deal with it.
Anyway, so I restart and relaunch iPhoto. No luck. It does the "loading photos" beachball and then the beachball goes away and it begins to draw the library background area... and then it crashes.
I'm at a lost. I've deleted the PLIST file, I've done the CMD-OPT launch, I've checked EVERYTHING.... rebuild thumbnails, library, etc. Nothing.
I've reinstalled iPhoto from iLife. Nothing.
Why doesn't APPLE have a serious troubleshooting section into fixing these HUGE amount of iPhoto problems? This is a product we're PAYING for.
If anybody has a good serious approach from A to Z in getting this stuff back, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks
G5 1.8GHz (old version)   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   1.5 GB RAM, 25GB free space on hard drive

Answer 1

Thanks, Mr Toad! Actually seemed to be a permissions problem somewhere in the library. Fixed by doing a GetInfo on iPhoto Library and forcing permissions on everything contained therein. I think perhaps another user had done something in the library after opening iPhoto with the opt key and changing to this library. Still have to sort that out. (Trying to somewhat share libraries among users.) Was able to get a default new library finally by blowing away the old library and all the users' preferences (saved off of course). So not quite as weird as the version problem created by Pacifist. Thanks for that link, tho, very interesting and a good note to hang onto.
-K