Post installation

We want to use Drupal on our intranet mainly for its forum capabilities. Since end users have already signed onto our network, I don't want them to have to login to our Drupal site again. I want Drupal to authenticate and recognize users based upon the login name found in the HTTP header. What I hope to acomplish is that a user can access our drupal site and post a forum topic without needing to supply a username and password. It sounds like Webserver_auth module is what we need to use is this correct?

I have been having some issues with the Webserver_auth module. I installed it and configured it to append the proper domain name to each user but it still is not working. My question is how do I fill the auth_map table with the network sign on information after the module is installed?

My site sends out an html newsletter using simplenews. The newsletter is pretty heavily formatted with tables, css and images. When I click on the "previous issues" link in the simplenews block, the node listing gets garbled with the theme and other blocks. The problem seems to be in the display of the teaser, as it can't close some of my html tags so the formatting gets carried over. The newsletters display fine when viewing as a node and in the email.

The main nav menu, which has "Navigation" for anonymous users, has the user's username once they're logged in. How do I change this really weird default? I'm using 4.6.5.

There are lot of books on our site, created using the book module. We want to have a link on the side which takes to that. This can also be in the primary/secondry links. Whats the URL which will take us to the page which shows books. I tried playing out with blocks and having a "book" block on the right sidebar, but it does not show up

Is it possible to do this?

For example, for a certain user role with a "publisher access role", only wants to look at story nodes when he goes to adminster > content > list. By default Drupal makes you apply a filter first, but i can anticipate a few hundred nodes in the near future, some access role specific settings would be ideal.

Are there any modules that give you greater control of such administrative listings? or other similar functions?

Thanks!