Drupal 7.x

I have a new installation of drupal, I did have an installation problem or two and at one stage copied the distribution back over the installed copy, and my hosting provider had to recover cgi-bin

I now appear to have a site running, although I have not yet addressed configuration file protection.

When I try to change from Blue Lagoon to Greenbeam I can only see the text.

appearance/settings/Color scheme any scheme other than Blue Lagoon does not work for me. When I save configuration the users see only text without the css

My company is making a news website for several schools, simply put;

- Each school will have its own unique content (news, unique users, etc)

BUT

- The theme will be the same throughout (blocks, views, etc), so only SOME of the content will change (Ex. unique news stories per school, but the same "contact us" or "about us" page for all the schools).

How do you deactivate wysiwyg on comments only? I still want the wysiwyg on the other textareas. For D6 there was the better formats module that could manage this, but not for D7.

I am trying to display a 3x3 grid of content on the front page of a new site. What I want to achieve is for the 1st grid (first in col-1 of 3) to be an image, say a picture of the author of the content, and then each subsequent piece of content in the grid should be articles the author has posted. I have used views to successfully create the 3x3 grid with text, but now I'm having some issues getting that image to display in col-1.

I can't use the attachment option, because in order to get the image to be placed in col-1, I would have to absolutely position it there, and then set the opacity of the first text entry in the grid to 0 -- which is too hackish for my tastes (I want to do this the right way).

I already have the header and footer of the respective view being driven by other content (the header is displaying a slogan and a PHP block with the date) and again, I would need to hack the positioning of the element to achieve the effect I want.

I am using Zen as a base theme, but I'm sure that's irrelevant in this case.

I have 3 questions:
1. Where can I find (and modify) the markup for User Log in block?
I've fiddled with it alot in .css but I'm having problems because Search button comes before item-list (Register, Request new password)

2. Where can I find (and modify) the Search block?
it's size=15, I want it to be longer, I want it to contain text, and I want to hide the Search Button
I've been able to position and style it with .css, but I'd like it to have a default text of "Search".

I'm using the my_theme/templates/html.tpl.php file with my google-code placed before the closing head tag.

Is this an appropriate way to include Google Analytics in a Drupal website? I guess it should really not be hard-coded into the theme but part of the admin? Does that mean use of something like a module for Google?

Thanks