Theme development

I've been predominantly tweaking the style sheet but would love to get rid of "Contact (1) 4 hours 42 min ago" [for example] in my menu/category elements in the left block [see http://sa.tsd.net.au] . I just want it to read "Contact".

I don't know if I need to extend a different theme [I'm rolling with chameleon]. The menu looks like this:

I don't think I can target anything in CSS,
help? anyone?

When I started using Drupal I started with an xtemplate theme and modified. Now I find I want to over ride the function theme_form_element to get rid of the hardcoded breaks. I realize I could swith to phptemplate but that seems like a lot of work to over ride a single function. So is there an official way to over ride a theme function using xtemplate?

By the way, for now I have "cheated" by creating a simple module with the theme specific version of the function and it works.

Thanks

how to get the link emailpage for every node in chameleon theme.

using Drupal 4.5

After every blog post, how to get trackbacks and readmore as links in the post,

In chameleon theme i guess it should be included

...
function chameleon_comment($comment, $link = "")
...

have anybody customized this.

Throughout the whole Drupal site (CVS version), there is a linebreak afer each and every form element. This is particularely annoying in the 'Events' and 'Schedule' modules, because these have form elements for day, month, year, hour and minute. Drupal adds a linebreak between each of these, including even the colon between hour and minute.

Does anyone know how to deal with this? I briefly installed Drupal 4.5.2, and didn't see the probem there. This should probably be fixed in CVS as well, as I would consider it a layout bug.

in chameleon theme, i could do this do get the output of quote

$output .= theme('quotes_quote', node_load(array('nid' => quotes_get_quote($the_block, TRUE))));

what is the equivalent of the same in phptemplate ie., how to mention the same in page.tpl.php

i have tried the above, no result and also removed $output again no result