How to unlink avatar from profile? How to link teaser's body to a post?

Hi.

I combined 2 questions, because they related to one usability problem on Home Page. I have a site with avatars enabled. On the Home Page avatar picture is close to the teaser, under the post title. Text flows aside and below the avatar. From the layout and design point of view it looks good.

Usability problem: avatar is visually dominant, more than a title. Some portion of users will mistakenly click on an avatar instead of a title to read a post. On the other hand, the body of the post's teaser is unclickable (opposite to many news sites). User have 2 ways to see a post: click on a title (dominated by avatar) and click on "read more", which is small and hardly visible.

Possible solution:
- Unlink avatar from user's profile, on Home and actually everywhere on the site.
- Link teaser's body to a post. Color change and underline link on the whole teaser on hover.

Now, can somebody help me with technical issues?
1) Is this looks serious problem and is worth to make changes to the core? I am on Drupal 5.3.
2) Can somebody make a patch for me and for anyone interested in solving this usability problem?
3) Is this possible to solve via module(s)?
4) Is this possible to solve via theming?

I am not php developer, nor CSS proficient. I can apply patches and make a little tweaking to themes, CSS, modules sources, but not too deep. I use theme "Foundation". Please, somebody help.

Thanks.
Arieh