Disc Utility Not Working

Ever since I have upgraded to Leopard on my old 2004 PowerBook G4, my disc utility has not worked properly. Lately I've noticed some odd little errors and general slow down with my Mac, and I am definitely starting to miss this feature not working as intended.

The problem:
- Whenever I open and try and verify or repair disc permissions, the status bar continues to run, but the actual application never finishes, so it just sits there doing nothing instead of running through and verifying and repairing the permissions.

I'm not really sure what I can do in this situation, but I would love some feedback and what I could do to make the disc utility run properly again.