Module development and code questions

When uploading an image, by default no albums are selected. If the user leaves it that way, the image doesn't show up anywhere. Is this correct operation, or am I misunderstanding something here?

I've been working on creating a module wrapper for qdig (http://qdig.sourceforge.net). It's built to be used as an included script, but when I call it from my module, all of it's global variables are null. In standalone mode it works fine, so I suspect that there is something interesting about the way globals work in an included script that I haven't been able to figure out.

I would like to be able to require users to select from a certain taxonomy based on his or her user-role or user group. Would this be an easy hack of the taxonomy.module or taxonomy_access? For example, if my user name is "bomarmonk" and my role is "engineer," then when I create a node, I would be required to label it with a term from the "engineer" vocabulary. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

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?