Post installation

I have read practically every post regarding the LOCK TABLES problem, which seems to be quite widespread. (I now understand why no-one has answered that forum query - because it's already been discussed a dozen time...) The appropriate solution offered is :

the DB user needs the LOCK permission

none of the posts were able to provide me with an explanation of how this is done. Can it be done through phpadmin? Is it something that must be done by the server hosting service (for those with a third-party / shared host, as I have)?

I've decided to use blogs on my community forum. I also intend to only have certain blocks appear on the blog pages. Problem is that the blog links to the individual entries use "node" in the url and not "blog."

I've read the documentation and learned that it takes advanced knowledge to create mass url aliasing so that all nodes of the blog type will be aliased to something like /blogs/nodeID.

I love Drupal 4.5.0. It is very cool!

I discovered the menu module to create blocks with extra menus. Very nice. What I would like to do is to have a navigation block that displays all items in a particular category. In other words, can I create a block that lists the hierarchy of my categories, and when clicked goes to the index of that category? When I create a new category, I would like it to auto-update.

This thread follows on from the one started in Upgrade forum: http://drupal.org/node/12142
I have configured .htaccess, httpd.conf and the root dir as per that thread but I still can't get Clean urls to work. Just produces error in errorlog (see aforementioned node for deatils of error).
ANY assistance would be very much appreciated.
Thankyou.

I have 2 questions, which are probably simply, but I can't figure it out.

1) How do I create additional pages? All I can figure out how to do is submit content to the front page. I want to have an "about us" page, for example. How would I create it so a link to "/about" goes to that page?

2) How do I add things to my site other than by using the submit content form? For example, drupal.org has the orange container with info about drupal 4.5. How would I add something similar?

Thanks in advance for the help!

I've installed a clean Drupal 4.5, enabled and tested file attachments, and enabled and tested the htmlarea module. When I try to get the image module working using GD2 (imagemagick is not available on this server), I can submit images directly without errors, but when I preview and then submit I get the following errors every time:

warning: getimagesize: Unable to open '' for reading. in /home/httpd/vhosts/kendow.com/httpdocs/xyz/modules/image.inc on line 30.