Thanks for the response! I had to set my Mac aside for other projects, but I will try to get back to it soon.
As for the CMOS question, if the battery is low, the openfirmware may not run correctly, or it may lose bits here and there. Usually, the internal clock stops keeping correct time first, and other issues begin to crop up after a while.

I have it on good authority from some Mac gurus at work that these jellybeans can't run OS-X of any flavor. The hardware just isn't robust enough to do it. They're telling me that 9.2x is the highest it will go. It is entirely possible that KDE or Gnome were trying to run applets that the video hardware couldn't handle, or there may have been another part of the system that couldn't handle a piece of code properly.

I'll see what I can find, and even if it takes a month or two, I'll try to post my results here.

Thanks again!