Theme development

I found a tutorial by Nick Lewis http://www.nicklewis.org/node/845 which shows how to do what I want, but I'm stuck at some point....

I'm new to Drupal, so I never experienced the old Drupal setup+names. If I read it right Drupal 5+ has renamed some things. Like nodes are named different since Drupal 5 (correct me if I'm wrong :) ).

Hi,

Intro:
This message concerns the use of a theme created for drupal 4.7 used by me on drupal 5. In the project information section above, I selected version: 47.x-1.x-dev. If this is not allowed when requesting support, please inform me. I am a semi newbie and not very active within the drupal community yet. I tried searching for such a rule restricting members from submitting such questions and was unsuccessful. If such a restriction exists, I apologize for not searching hard enough.

I've recently started work on moving one of my Drupal sites to be more microsite-friendly. One of the things I've run into is wanting to use a base theme to define a general layout, and then use a sub-theme to make changes as needed. I realized that the only thing a sub-theme could do was change what the style.css was, and had an idea.

I've searched and searched for this, and could not find it. It's possible I used non-drupal terms...but if anyone knows where I can find this...please lead me.

This is a two part question.

1.

I am using the PRIMARY LINKS menu item. It houses my 1st, 2nd and 3rd level navigation. I can get the 1st and 2nd levels to show up...but what would the naming convention be for the 3rd level?

under normal circumstances drupal place all 'title' on the front page as links

under my client's circumstances they do not want this, so in short titles on the front page should no appear as links...but i am unsure of how to do this.

I'll be searching the site and playing with drupal to find a solution, but in the mean time if anyone has some info that would help :)

mainly is this something i can do using the drupal GUI or do i need to hack the php, xhtml, or css ?

I am very new to drupal, and am still trying to get my head round theming. I want to know how I can place the login box and the navigation in two different areas as opposed to in one region (sidebar_left). Any help would be much appreciated. many thanks, Nick.