Module development and code questions

I apologize if this is the wrong forum for this type of question...

I have edited user.module to add a "Log in via SSL" option beneath the "Register New Account" option. Here is some code snippet:

I just talked with a client of mine and he asked what he could do if a module install caused his site to break due to a php-level error ("white page of death", like here. I told him to go to the system table using phpmyadmin through his hosts cpanel account and change the 1 to a 0 in the enabled column in the row for that module, but while he's savvy enough to do this, many aren't, and so I wonder about possible tools for helping people out in this situation. Here are two possiblilities:

Greetings,

I'm trying to customize the CSS for TinyMCE

These directions:

/* You can extend this CSS by adding your own CSS file with the content_css option */

I don't understand. Where is this option located exactly? I've looked around the forums but can't figure it out.

I've review the FAQ too for TinyMCE, but perhaps I'm being dense.

Thank you in advance.

Erika

Hello, I've made my own widget, (It's an alternative widget to the node-reference module).

It's got two select boxes, you move things from the left one to the right, to 'select' them. I'll make it opensource when it's done.

I'm stuck on how to connect it to the database. It says on http://drupal.org/node/106716

We're developing a drupal site for a nonprofit that has a lot of volunteers serving several functions, such as leading tours, visiting local schools for outreach, and doing data entry. The administrators would like to use the site to help keep track of how much time volunteers are spending completing various tasks. They would eventually like to use this information to prepare graphic rich reports for grant applications. Are there any modules that come to mind that might help us track volunteer time?

I am having a number of issues with Drupal 5.1 and the 5.x Leech modules:

First, I am a veteran PHP developer and user of other CMS systems. But Drupal is fairly new to me, so please forgive my ignorance.

My setup runs on 2 boxes - one production server in a cage, and one dev server at my location. The filesystem is rsync'd from production to dev, and I collect regular dumps from the database. When fetching feeds either manually or via cron, it is taking a *very* long time to pull everything in. It takes 2-3 minutes per feed, and a total of around 5 minutes if done through cron.php. I have put some debug statements in to make sure that nothing is timing out, and it gets both the RSS content and the keywords from Yahoo. The feeds are small and show up in my browser within around 1 or 2 seconds from both locations. Why would it be this slow?

Also, there appears to be a problem with the vocabulary code in leech_yahoo_terms.module. From what I can tell, the problem is in the leech_yahoo_terms_create_vocabulary_items() function. For starters, the $nid that is being passed in is sometimes 0, other times it has a legal value. In either case, the call to get the $vid always results in 0, which causes the function to return FALSE. Is this some kind of setup issue? The feeds come in and populate fine - and everything seems ok in the admin UI.