Sorry, I will try to do a better job explaining:
First off, I have 2 WordPress installs.
The first is Wordpress Version 2.9.2. This is a live website that has been running for awhile. At some point (before I was hired), some of the images quit displaying. I came in and eliminated the use of the Timthumb image resizer php and instead just resized the images myself ahead of time. The site began (but may have been for a long time as it gets extremely low traffic) to display 500 internal server errors intermittently, as in about every 20 - 30 page clicks. The error was not limited to a single page either. They seem to go away when Pods is disabled.
So, to troubleshoot, I began by making a new WordPress installation in a subdirectory for testing. I install the latest WP version, 3.8. I then installed the WordPress Importer plugin and imported the data from the live site. Next, I installed Pods. At this point, if I click activate, I get a 500 Internal Server error. I also get the same error if I try to visit this wordpress install (via the subdirectory).
I can't help but think these are somehow related, and perhaps due to an issue with my server, I am lost at this point and have spent about 30 hours on this.
Hope that is a little better picture of the 2 issues I am experiencing.