Post installation

I am putting together a forum for Health Disease and Conditions. I created a "container" for each condition.

The problem is, that on the forum page, right under the container, it says "post new forum topic." This is a bit confusing because to the casual user, that link implies you can post a sub topic to the Container -- especially because the the Forum dropdown menu on the form defaults to the Container Name (e.g., Diabetes), but if you try to do so, an error appears that says you can't post a topic to a container.

So for example:

1) Container = Diabetes
- Post a New Forum Topic (this link appears on the template)

a) Forum 1= Newly Diagnose
b) Forum 2= Recipes
c) etc.

I then try a different approach, which is to use *no* containers as follows:

2) Forum = Diabetes
- Post a New Forum Topic (this link appears on the template)

a) Forum Topic 1 = Newly Diagnosed
b) Forum Topic 2 = Recipes

Approach number 2 seems to work better from a front-end usability perspective, but I want to make sure I'm not missing something before I build out the entire taxonomy of Forum and Topics.

QUESTIONS:
1) What do I lose by not starting with a container?

It seems to me that the CCK/imagecache/imagefield option is more versatile than using the Image module. Besides not being able to use modules like Image gallery, are there disadvantages to going the CCK route? The kind of flexibility I want is to create a contenttype that, when in full view, plays a Flash .swf...and in teaser view, displays a jpg, and in listview, displays a thumbnail jpg. I can't seem to pull this off with just the Image module and image_attach.

How can I make certain menu items visible to different roles.
For example, I would only allow 'Editors' to add Story or Page content, therefore I only want the menu item 'Add Content' to be visible to 'Editors'.

So far I have to say that Drupal is simply the most workable out of fresh install in comparison to any other free system I've played with.

I already know that Drupal can handle multiple sites using the same codebase.
However, is there anyway, without hacking the code, that you can have those sites use the same User Accounts for logging in?

If code hacking is required for this, than can someone point me to what parts of the code I might have to modify?
Additionally, when updates to Drupal come out does anyone see this as being a nightmare to administer?

System:
Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
MySQL 5.0
PHP 5.1
Drupal 5.1
Apache 2.2.4

I was able to run the install script and see "Drupal installation complete" page. It states:

When somebody posts a new comment, it needs to be approved and goes into the approval queue. I was using Wordpress before, where I got an email every time a comment was on queue. Should it be the same with drupal or do I need a special module to get an email notification whenever somebody posts a new comment?