Post installation

I have upgraded to Drupal 4.4.0rc and tried configuring and using the new theme engine and have decided it a dog and will probably put people off because its too difficult, and i've found it too restrictive for the design i want with the knowledge that I have. Read the guide on upgrading themes like I have done with previous updates, however this time I got nowhere, tried making one to work with xtemplate, it kinda works however its too restrictive for my sites design, which is the look of goofy but written in html rather than evil javascript.

Note that the value of PHP's configuration option magic_quotes_gpc is incorrect. It should be set to '0' for Drupal to work properly. Either configure your webserver to support .htaccess files so Drupal's .htaccess file can set it to the proper value, or edit your php.ini file directly. This message will automatically dissapear when the problem has been fixed.

Enabling the latest htmlArea in 4.4 causes these header output areas.

It is due to some misconfiguration on my part? I upgraded an existing system rather than installing from scratch.

warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at c:\pathtodrupal\htdocs\modules\htmlarea.module:464) in c:\pathtodrupal\htdocs\modules\user.module on line 674.

I have runed Drupal local for some time and it works. So i Send it upp to my webbhotel and it doesn´t work. They are using Apach.
I get I 500 error message. I killed my htaccess and Drupal runed with all varnings. So I go back to htaccess chang to .same problem.
My support said you can`t chang the php setting with htaccess file.
So what do I do
Sten

#
# Apache/PHP/site settings:
#

# Protect files and directories from prying eyes:

order deny,allow
deny from all

# Set some options
Options -Indexes
Options FollowSymLinks

# Set the default handler to index.php:
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

# Customized server error messages:
ErrorDocument 400 /error.php
ErrorDocument 402 /error.php
ErrorDocument 403 /error.php
ErrorDocument 404 /error.php
ErrorDocument 500 /error.php

# Overload PHP variables:

# If you are using Apache 2, you have to use
# instead of .
#
php_value register_globals 0
php_value track_vars 1
php_value short_open_tag 1
php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0
php_value magic_quotes_runtime 0
php_value magic_quotes_sybase 0

Did a clean install to the CVS 4.4 release. Everything looks good except in config it is not accecpting my dir entry for /files it accepted the /tmp dir but it does not like the /files entry.

I read somewhere (and I can't find it now...) that it's possible to add new attributes to user profiles, and to add new fields to the signup page. I'd like to add a 'referred by' field, so new users can give credit to existing users who referred them to the site.

Can someone point me to the relevant Drupal APIs for this? I'm new to Drupal but not to PHP or SQL, so I'm looking forward to getting into the code.

Thanks!