BuddahBoy, not tryting to step on Vger as he knows this beter than I, but your having issues I had, do you use standard osC? or BTS, CRE ect?
I fixed the file not writeable with pemiissions changes, I chnaged to 777 then back to 644 and all worked, that is for the Intro only if you use it, if you don't no big deal. As far as the pictures, that was a headache for me, I need to set the SMALL_IMAGE_WIDTH and SMALL_IMAGE_HEIGHT in teh admin to smaller than any of my pics, I resized some pics to deal with this and make everyting look good, I also commented out the "$not_supported_formats = array ("GIF"); // Write in capital Letters" in html_output.php to get my gif images working, at least with the GD lib I have it works. I am going to change all mine to jog soon. This was a pain but all my images then started going into the imagecache directory.
Hope this helps a bit..
The final result was really nice, great work Vger, thank you.