Post installation

I have suggested drupal as an alternative to this blogger based site, but I am finding it hard to locate good examples of community blogging implementations of drupal.

I would appreciate some suggestions.

How do I go about hiding a menu item? I know this has been asked over and over again but the scenario I'm using I'm lost with it.

I see that Drupal creates menu's on the fly with the nice system built in (from 4.6 menu on the fly), however when I add it to a block and restrict users that way, it does not expand properly.

Here's a link as to what I'm talking about.
http://noosh.usinternet.com/drupal_menu.jpg

I'm using the exposed filters in views to search information input by users with cck. Is there any way to get these exposed filters to be pull-down menues and checkboxes instead of just text fields?

I installed 4.6 as an upgrade some time ago. The chnage in the image module seemed to add the thumbs in with the preview and original size versions of each picture. Previously in 4.5they were in a separate sub-folder.

At any rate the system has been working fine for some months, with thumbs appearing an nodes etc.
Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the thumbs do not appear and instead are substituted by the ful size image. Since many of our posts incorporate images, we now have a very messy presentation which you can see by going here:

I need to edit the search_form or search_box functions from the search.module.

I would like to change the value of the search submit button from 'Search' to 'GO'.

I am able to do this by changing either of the below:

$form['basic']['inline']['submit'] = array('#type' => 'submit', '#value' => t('Search'));

$form['submit'] = array('#type' => 'submit', '#value' => t('Search'));

it seems that when ever i try to create a story and i use image tags it does not work at all i get default 404 error
yet once i remove any image html it posts fine
anyone can please help me with this