Hi, I'm sure I had this working before but now have a weird bug going: in the screensaver section of System Preferences, whenever I click on any of my picture folders (iPhoto albums or straight pictures folder) I get an error message saying Even weirder is if I click on "Choose Folder ..." it just freezes up with the spinning beachball. Once I made the mistake of clicking on test and it froze the whole computer so that I had to hard restart.

You could have some minor directory damage. I suggest you boot from your original installer discs, then run Disk Utility from the File menu of the Mac Os X Installer, then get it to 'repair disk' then 'repair permissions'. Restart and try the Choose Folder thingy again, and let us know.

Sorry, I should have posted that in my above message. I'd already run fsck and repair permissions with no change. I've just had to hard reboot it again as I forgot to change it off the pictures folder and when I woke my MacBook from sleep I was greeted by a black screen and spinning beachball.