System Preferences freezes at Parental Controls

I inherited my mother-in-laws old iMac 800MHz PowerPC G4 running 10.4.11 with 512mb ram as a computer for my young nieces to use. My MIL deleted her important files but left a lot of apps on the iMac before handing it over. I did not do a clean install of 10.4 like I had hoped because this computer originally shipped with Jaguar and my MIL no longer has the Tiger upgrade disks. Nevertheless, I was able to set-up the iMac over x-mas with parental controls for my two nieces user accounts. The computer is obviously old and not blazing fast but works well enough. I'm visiting this week and wanted to teach my brother how to do parental controls and other things on the iMac. Problem is that when we go into system prefs and click on either of my nieces user names and then select Parental Controls, it gets stuck. The window never populates with all the applications and our only choice is to quick system preferences. While over x-mas, parental controls was slow and took a while to list all the applications, it did successfully work. I've verified and repaired disk permissions, cleaned out caches and run the recommended tasks using Cocktail, but no luck. I've also tried making a new test account but it also gets stuck on the parental controls tab.
My brother would like to wipe out the entire computer and start with a fresh install of Tiger however that would require purchasing a full version of Tiger. Since the computer is only used by my nieces for games and such, I don't think it's worth paying >$150 for Tiger.
Any thoughts on why Parental Controls is getting stuck? And any idea on how to resolve it?

I hate being stumped too.
If all the above fails, then it appears to be time for a relatively painless Archive & Install, which gives you a new/old OS, but can preserve all your files, pics, music, settings, etc., as long as you have plenty of free disk space and no Disk corruption, and is relatively quick & painless...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107120
Just be sure to select Preserve Users & Settings.
Reapply the Combo update.
The combo update for PowerPC-based Macs...
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx10411comboupdateppc.html
The combo update for Intel-based Macs...
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx10411comboupdateintel.html
Repair Permissions after re-install, then reboot again.

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