Kirk
I don't know if hamiltonphoto's problem has been solved but I thought I would tell you of a similar oddity that happened to me. Maybe it relates. I have a G4 550 MHz Powerbook, OS 10.4, PM 4.4.3.3, Photoshop CS.
Somewhere in the process of updating from 10.4 to 10.4.9, I lost the use of certain text fields in numerous applications. Specifically in PM, I had to resort to typing in any field but the caption field and then paste into the caption field. If I typed in the caption field, the first non-letter character would close the Info window and revert to last previously saved text (if any at all). In fact I could not even paste twice unless I closed the Info window between each pasting to save any changes. Sounds confusing, doesn't it. End result... I downgraded to OS 10.4 and all the bugs went away including similar issues in other apps. It seems to be an issue with my hardware and the version of OS X. Perhaps hamiltonphoto should boot up from an earlier version of OS X and make some tests. Just a thought.
Dave