Edit Comments permission - disable or set time limit for registered users to edit own comments

We just launched a new Drupal site at www.thecubreporter.com and I wanted to disable registered users from editing their own comments or setting a time limit on it. I found this patch:

http://drupal.org/node/54788

and tried to apply it. I did it manually since it wasn't much code and outdated.

The permissions showed up appropriately, but when I went to the comment settings I received a fatal error:

Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array in...public_html/modules/system.module at line 1077.

I'm not a programmer by any means and was hoping someone could help me figure this out. I'm running Drupal 5.7 and did contact the author of the patch, but says he's not doing any programming anymore. Obviously I re-loaded the comment.module that comes with drupal 5.7. I'm open to other ideas to solve the problem as well.

Thanks in advance...
Rob G.