Module development and code questions

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:

I've written a module that implements the functions removed in Drupal 4.6, logging each call to these deprecated functions to the watchdog. Benefits are:

I am using contact directory module, it Seems like a great module, but I want to be able to show the contacts to people who are not members of the site. So far, I can't figure out a way to do this. Is there an quick fix in the .module file?

I'm trying to understand why I want to use db_next_id instead of just letting a table with an autoincrement do its thing. Drupal docs says "for compatibility reasons" but I'm not sure what incompatibilities there might be. Granted I only know mysql, and only enough to get me by...

Here is an example from aggregator.module ( vrs 1.213.2.3)

    $edit['fid'] = db_next_id('{aggregator_feed}_fid');
    db_query('INSERT INTO {aggregator_feed} (fid, title, url, refresh, block) VALUES (%d, \'%s\', \'%s\', %d, %d)',
                  $edit['fid'],$edit['title'], $edit['url'], $edit['refresh'], $edit['block']);

The aggregator fid column is autoincrement, so why not just pass it a NULL or 0?

The reason I ask is I'm playing with some ideas for a per user RSS feeds module, and I would like to reuse some of the aggregator functions. However, trying to get at the last ID added to the aggregator table without using something like LAST_INSERT_ID() is troublesome and slow. Since LAST_INSERT_ID only stores the last id when the autoincrement is allowed to 'go off' and do it's thing, using db_next_id and inserting the returned value directly doesn't register anything with LAST_INSERT_ID...

I'm thinking this is a postgre versus mysql thing...

Looking at db_next_id it uses nextval() to get the id - i thought I might be able to use currval() to do the same thing as LAST_INSERT_ID() but that didn't work out...

I'm writing a custom module. When I change something in my module, save the changes and refresh the page on my development server, more often than not (or always even?) I can't see the changes. Not until I go to administer->menu and then poof, when I go back to the page I see the updates.

I've found similar problems with the installation of drupal-docs I've made locally.

Not fun when I'm making many changes and alt-tab, refreshing the page.

Am I being thick, or is it true that the standard boolean search operators (at least I think that's what they're called) are not supported by the drupal site-search box?

The kind of operations I mean are:
"search for whole phrase"
search+for+all+terms (usually default)
search,for,any,of,these,terms
-filter -out -these -terms
(combine)+(operators -junk)
etc etc - my apologies if I've used the wrong operator characters, I'm just used to using the common search engine defaults ...

and while I'm at it: