Post installation

I would like to be notified via email about new forum posts/replies. Is there any way to do that?

Am using Drupal 4.6.4. But even with 4.6.3, it has come to my attention that some (or perhaps most) of my new users don't receive the e-mail containing their password. Some users have contacted me about the problem, and at the same time I see in the logs that most users don't get to log in after registering -- I only see the "New user" logs without a "session opened" follow-up.

Any idea what could be wrong? My installation is set up on a shared host.

I would like to show an index.html page, that is shown before the user enter's my drupal site whenever http://www.domain.com/ is opened. However, it seems that Drupal's .htaccess file doesn't allow this. I've tried adding a condition that says that Drupal can only rewrite rules if the path isn't /, but that doesn't work (I guess the syntax is wrong):

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !/

Any idea's on how to do this?

I was looking for a solution by which passwords cannot be compromised by sniffing. since https requires a new public ip etc., etc,. the other option is http digest authentication. Any HOWTO on using it with drupal login?

I tried to create a duplicate of my drupal installation so that I can run it via XAMPP on my local machine. I copied all the folders from my webserver to my hard disk - exported the database - and modified the settings.php. But when I call http://localhost/mysite/ only the blocks and the header appear but the nodes are not accessible. Probably it is a problem with the URLs. Please give me a hint.

This is my first patch. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Using drupal v4.6.4. I followed the instructions on installing a patch (http://drupal.org/node/14231 - great instructions BTW) using PuTTY. I was in the correct directory and could see both files. Tried 'patch taxonomy.module < taxonomy.patch ' and 'patch -p0 < taxonomy.patch'. Both times I got '18 out of 18 hunks failed.' I assume this means it didn't work. Does anyone have a suggestion on what I can/should do next?

Thanks!