Module development and code questions

Hey everyone,

I have recently began working with Drupal 5 and I'm really impressed thus far. I have read a few books and gotten our site architecture to a point that I am very happy.
There is one last piece that I need to integrate and I would like to get some insight on the best way to approach this.

I have nicelinks working well on a Drupal 4.7.6.3 site, but would like to tweak it a bit to support my environment. My Drupal is actually vbDrupal and I've noticed that the Drupal side of things is having difficulty locating certain files due to the way the site structure is customized. (Example: forum/modules/nicelinks/nicelinks.js not found).

I have a cron function set up to add content automatically. This works wonderfully if I run it myself (using the cron url) but the content is not added if it is run anonymously.

Is there a way to temporarily (via code) become a user just for the specific function and then unload the $user object once it is finished?

I have no desire to change permissions to allow anonymous users to add content.

I have installed the calendar module and i get the default text:

No upcoming events available

And i cant seem to find where to change it. My client wants to say something a bit more clever there, and from what i have found, i cant change it.

If anyone knows where i can edit that default - that would be awesome. Thanks so much.

I seem to have found a serious bug in lm_paypal. It's hard for me to believe this has not be uncovered after a year so I am asking if anyone else can confirm this bug.

We discovered in testing that the "my account" display of paid adverts changes in some unpredictable fashion when you click on the sort buttons for Title or any other field.

Is there a way i can mod the index file of the story book at the moment it looks like.

Story

• Example 1
• Example 2
• Example 3

I want it like so.

Story

example 1 [no.of.views]
a small description..

example 2 [no.of.views]
a small description..

example 3 [no.of.views]
a small description..

Now i can set that up myself, but i don't know how to edit the index page of the story book so i can include that.