Module development and code questions

I think alot more people than myself could use a module install and uninstall wizard. I believe this wouldn't be too complicated to implement, so I suggest we get started. I've given it a little bit of though, and here some of them are in text format.

I believe a good way to go about is to make an installwizard module. It would be nice to be able to turn it on and of as there might be som security issues involved.

Many may consider it a problem to upload files into the modules directory. I believe a good solution to this is to connect to the ftp-server of your site in the script. Some of the ftp details should be configured and stored, username and password should be provided on every install to minimize security risks (please comment on the security, I'm not to sure about it). This way people could download the module package, and upload that in the administrator section of their drupal site.

Every installable module should implement an install hook, and possibly an uninstall hook. These could benefit from helper functions in the installwizard, such as installwizard_execute_db_file().

The wizard should show several screens depending on the module. Users could be given the oppertunity to configure new permissions, menuitems and module specific options defined in the module itself in the install process. The wizard could call parts of the drupal core to accomplish this.

There should be an easy solution to this, but it escapes me.

I'm trying to use the 4.5 module propstar.module (which has apparently ceased development) with 4.6 RC (downloaded and running 4/12).

Problem is, on output, the module's return value:

<a href="/?q=propstar/rate/10/1" title="Rate this node 1 star."><img src="/modules/propstar/star.gif" alt="Rate this node 1 star." /><;/a>

Is being processed and returned as follow:

When uploading an image, by default no albums are selected. If the user leaves it that way, the image doesn't show up anywhere. Is this correct operation, or am I misunderstanding something here?

I've been working on creating a module wrapper for qdig (http://qdig.sourceforge.net). It's built to be used as an included script, but when I call it from my module, all of it's global variables are null. In standalone mode it works fine, so I suspect that there is something interesting about the way globals work in an included script that I haven't been able to figure out.

I would like to be able to require users to select from a certain taxonomy based on his or her user-role or user group. Would this be an easy hack of the taxonomy.module or taxonomy_access? For example, if my user name is "bomarmonk" and my role is "engineer," then when I create a node, I would be required to label it with a term from the "engineer" vocabulary. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

Has anyone had experience using an online chat package that interfaced with Drupal in any way? To be specific this solution would need to be: