I've been running AOLserver 4 exclusively for development for some months now, haven't seen the photo load lock-up being described (though I'm running beta8 not beta10).
As far as PG not building under Panther, this is a known issue and yes, it is due to a later version of gcc being used. Someone posted a workaround on the PG hackers list a few days ago, and supposedly the PG 7.4 CVS HEAD compiles fine.
