imac strawberry g3 with panther freezes on display dialog boxes

Hi… I am wondering if anyone has experienced this and knows what the deal is?

If I run a script that says on my imac strawberry g3 with panther (I tried two different installs of panther from two different hard drives 10.3 and 10.3.9)

display dialog “hi there”

I get a blank window and I cannot click ok… It’s frozen… The same thing happens with choose from list and choose folder… etc etc… basically any interactive window.

please help!

-patrick