Installing Drupal

Hey there, i finally managed to get a staging site set up , and after playing around for a while, I attempted installing the image module from the newly refurbished (and awesome) downloads page.

Sadly however, I couldn't get it working just right .. the config check admin page of the image module told me that i needed to set up a vocabulary to browse the thumbnails .. when clicking on the 'taxonomy' link .. it just sits there .. loading..

i've tried several times now , and started disabling modules to see if that's causing it.

Any ideas?

At the page http://www.drupal.org/node.php?id=68, there is not possible to download theme and modules !!!
Click on the link send to Drupal's homepage...

I'm unfortunately left in the situation that my host won't upgrade PHP (it's currently running a patched version of 4.0.3pl1 without XML support). Desperate to try out Drupal, I 'messed' around with things until it worked. Here are the list of things I changed:

1. commented out dl("xml.so") from includes/xmlrpc.inc
2. removed & from any =& operations (php produced a parse error when this was present)
3. created custom array_map function and placed in includes/conf.php
4. created custom call_user_func_array function and placed in includes/conf.php

Some of the Drupal 4.x themes, like ax and sunflower are still asking the user to edit the $themes array to install it. At first I was confused since there was no $themes array in the conf.php file. Then I looked in the conf.php of v3.0.2, and found the $themes array. However, I couldn't get these themes to show up correctly even after I put in the correct $themes array in the 4.1.0 conf.php.

I'm not in a hurry to install those themes that don't work by just placing them in the theme directory... just wanted to make sure the developers are aware of this.

Thanks.

Is there a way to set a default timezone for new user registrations? 99% of my users will be from the same geographic location, so I don't want to have them each reconfigure their timezone setting (which I know 90% wouldn't bother doing).

I tried searching the site for info on timezone but I didn't see anything relevant except for a request for this feature, I believe.
http://www.drupal.org/node.php?id=723

admin.php?mod=system&type=filter

When I go to the content filters section of site configuration in admin, I see gibberish characters like:

D