Theme development

This may very well turn out to be a damn complex endeavor (maybe too complex for a noob such as myself) but I was wondering if I could get some layout help for the Kubrick theme. What I'm wanting to do is better explained with this image, a rough idea. I'd like everything published to the front page to be inconified, and have the full text hidden away, for a more sleek interface.

when creating content for personal blog entry the browser page width increases, it doesnt happen with other nodes.

any comments...

When I create an image node, and promote it to the front page, the front page only shows the thumbnail. How do I get the full view of the image to show instead?

I am using /node as my home page and it is listing the Title and excerpt for every node that has been promoted to the front page. How do I get it to display the complete node (including body). My goal is to have the home page display the last 10 nodes in their entirety, one after the other.

Same thing for image nodes. When I upload an image, and promote it to the front page, only the Title, a thumbnail, and excerpt are displayed on the home page. I would like the full image to display, not just the thumbnail.

I've been predominantly tweaking the style sheet but would love to get rid of "Contact (1) 4 hours 42 min ago" [for example] in my menu/category elements in the left block [see http://sa.tsd.net.au] . I just want it to read "Contact".

I don't know if I need to extend a different theme [I'm rolling with chameleon]. The menu looks like this:

I don't think I can target anything in CSS,
help? anyone?

When I started using Drupal I started with an xtemplate theme and modified. Now I find I want to over ride the function theme_form_element to get rid of the hardcoded breaks. I realize I could swith to phptemplate but that seems like a lot of work to over ride a single function. So is there an official way to over ride a theme function using xtemplate?

By the way, for now I have "cheated" by creating a simple module with the theme specific version of the function and it works.

Thanks