Theme development

I am new at this, I have the Upgrade file for the theme fancy 5.x, buy I don't know how to install it. I just dropped it in the fancy directory.
I have some problem with the primary links with this theme on version 5.x. They don't show up.
Could some one tell me how to fix this problems?

I wanted a list of news items on my home page. The home page was a standard Page node (#9), so I wrote the below code in node.tpl.php (it uses the Views module). I assume this is "philosophically wrong," but I need to know why and what the "correct" method is.

(I've seen the "Insert View" module, but that's not available for 5.0.)

The theme garland don't validate XHTML, if you change this element can validate your site:

Is it possible to access something like $block->region from inside node.tpl.php? I'd like to theme nodes differently depending on which region they're in.

Quick question, how do you change the Icon used when you take your site off-line for maintenance from the Drupal drop to something else?

Thanks.

I am working on themeing my primary links and am a bit confused. I've sent the links through the menu_links.tpl.php file and they are showing up on the page as expected but I'm looking at the classes that have been assigned to them: