Couple things, firstly we don't actively develop on or support CentOS 4 as it is typically very difficult to install easily on that version of the distro. There are a number of reasons including unsupported Python and PostgreSQL versions provided by the distro and Apache packages with various bugs. If you want to save yourself a lot of pain I'd suggest avoiding CentOS 4 if you can.
Secondly, it's likely that you're going to be able to easily get around your issues with just a chmod +rx on your home directory. Depending on how /home is configured and how your home directory was created certain RHEL and RHEL derivative distros can be incredibly pedantic about setting 0700 modes on $HOME.
