Assistance configuring Forums

Hi Drupal Community,

Let me start by saying I am a complete noob with Drupal.  I quite literally installed it yesterday so if I am in the wrong forum or asking basic questions, I apologize.  I am trying to replace a sharepoint forum site with Drupal forums.  If that goes well, I would look to make Drupal a true Content Management System and essentially the portal for our company to find information.

I have several questions so please let me know if I need to break these into multiple posts or not.  I will try to keep a multi question post specific to a given set of functionality where I believe it is related.  If that's not appropriate, please let me know. 

I figured out that I need to add various modules to enable functionality so I downloaded and installed several to support the forums.  High level, I am trying to allow people to subscribe to a forum as well as send email responses and have the response autopost.  

My first question is, when I tried to enable Forum e-mail (femail) from the modules, I get the following error:

Notice: Undefined index: description in drupal_check_module() (line 1261 of /volume1/web/drupal/includes/install.inc).

I googled this to death but I didn't find anything.  The module will not activate.  On the uninstall tab, I don't have any modules available. I went this route because I was thinking to try a simple uninstall and reinstall as sometimes that magically clears things up in other systems.  

Ok, so I tabled that issue (I would love some help or direction though) and moved on to the subscription side of things.  I downloaded and installed Message and Subscriptions and their required modules.  I activated both.  I then configured the content subscribe_node flag and assigned it to the administrator and authenticated user roles.  On the forum content, I selected the flag Content for the "Flag for following" section and then selected the message types.  I tried to test by subscribing to an existing forum thread (a test thread I created).  The subscribe link changed to "Unsubscribe" but I never received an email saying I was subscribed.  I tried to test the subscription email by posting a comment and got this error:

EntityMetadataWrapperException: Unknown data property field_target_comment. in EntityStructureWrapper->getPropertyInfo() (line 354 of /volume1/web/drupal/sites/all/modules/entity/includes/entity.wrapper.inc).

I am fairly sure the overall site is set up for email alerting as I received an email when creating a non admin user. 

Can someone point me in the right direction on the above issues.  Also, a question on subscribing to the forums - how can I set up subscriptions so someone can subscribe to an entire forum and not just individual threads?  Right now, there is no subscribe link until you select into an individual thread.  

Thanks so much for any help on these issues and questions.