Creating better image layouting with Content Templates & Imagecache / loking for examples on theming contemplate

I have several different types of nodes. Lets call one "news", and in the CCK fields of "news" I can add images.

This is themed only by Imageche presets, that allow images to be smaller in the teaser and larger once in the node.

I want to theme this better, so that image in the teaser are small with the text wrapping around it and I only want one image to show up in the teaser. Nodes of this type often have up to five images.

My questions are;

How do I theme the CCK templates, are there any recipes out there that I can read as examples?

Can I control this so that only 1 single image appears in the teaser, regardless of how many are attached to the node?

Can I make it so that when in full node, I can place text between images instead of having [one giant block of text] and then [one giant block of images] or vice versa?

In short, how an we theme the templates better? I have read the help/contemplate page, I am looking for examples for someone who is not a coder.

I have commented here http://drupal.org/node/315068 and here http://drupal.org/node/536760.