Theme development

I am at wit's end. I'm trying to integrate blogads into my blog at http://www.pennywit.com/drupal. I want to put the adstrip in a block in the upper right-hand corner of my right sidebar.

However, the code, for some reason, is wiping out the Header ("SPONSORS"), such that the block header doesn't display for the users. I found that if I highlight the header, however, it becomes visible.

Through testing, I found a few things:

1) Changing from "PHP" to "filtered HTML" to "full HTML" inputs didn't help.
2) Using PHP "echo" statements didn't help.
3) the .block .h2 element renders slightly differently in the "Sponsors" block than elsewhere. In most blocks, the border-bottom stretches across the block. In the Sponsors block, it only stretches under the header text.
4) Swapping the block from the left column to the right didn't help.
4) The block renders normally in all other themes, both xtemplate and phptemplate.

Here are the vitals:

I'm running Drupal 4.5.0, using a phptemplate (4.5.0)-based theme called "penny3." I'm viewing the page in the latest version of IE.
The relevant CSS:

td.sidebar {
vertical-align: top;
padding: 0px;
height: 100%;
}
#sidebar-left {
width: 200px;
}

#sidebar-right {
width: 160px;
}

.sidebar .block {
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border-top: 3px solid #000099;
border-bottom: 2px solid #000099;

Hello.

Is there a way just to restyle the nodes of the forum?

I want to let them look like a normal bulletin board, so the name of the poster is displayed on the right, maybe even with an avatar, it shell look similar to phpbb, vbulletin, wbb and all these boards..

greetz,
Frando

First, I want to say I'm a newbie to Drupal. So far I like it, and has had not so many problems to solve. Or not too hard to crack by myself.

Second - I wanted to personalize my testing website with the ADC theme. Installing and running the site with this theme is not a problem - it comes at the very moment I click on submit when posting some content (it was blog entry I tried) - I get this message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: link_node() in /disk3/free/www/kolodej/themes/adc/adc.theme on line 125

On 4.6 that is. To be more precise the default avatart shows in preview no the actual users avatar. Is this a theme engine bug?

I would like to display the number of comments on a given Story on the homepage for instance, just like the drupal.org them:

» 5 comments · 5 new comments · read more

How can I do this?

I notice that the Drupal Smarty theme engine has not been released for 4.6 (maybe the 4.5 version works anyway?)

Is this a sign that noone wants to use Smarty with Drupal? I do.