The thrift I bought the iMac in has on rare occasions had iMacs and Apple monitors in the past, but I never thought about buying them before. I'm trying not to take up space with a computer I don't really use. Ah, the life of a clutterer.
Well, I got it to work finally. I opened it up, removed the hard drive, and popped it into an external FireWire enclosure. Plugged it into my trusty ol' eMac, and found that someone (probably kids, from the look of it) fooled around with it and renamed a bunch of things, including the drive, the OS X System folder, and the OS 9 System Folder. Renamed everything, ran Disk Utility on it to check a little deeper, and then re-installed the HD and started it up. Worked fine. It looked like a business computer for a law firm. And I found an AOL disc inside the CD drive. Could have been the problem right there!
I dug out Norton Utilities 2.0, and I'm giving the thing a good going-over. Good news is, it's already got OS X 10.3 installed. I gave my spare copy of OS X 10.3 to my sister along with my friend's iBook, so I don't need to get that back from her anytime soon. I wasn't sure if there would be all that new of a OS X revision on it, so I'm happy about that. Now I need to install OpenOffice on it, and find a spare keyboard.