Worked BEFORE ... Doesn't work ANYMORE ... Huh?

Once again, Hello.
I'm getting pretty frustrated because I'm experiencing little problems here and there ... partially where there were no problems before. I'm also missing information to fine-tune our video portal since there's no documentation included with the latest script. I've been wanting to have this running 2 weeks ago (perfectly) yet there's so much that lacks proper information. I'm currently 2 weeks behind schedule and it wouldn't have to be this way if the developers ever responded to some of these questions. I really love the script but the lack of responsiveness from vshare is really beginning to try my patience. We're getting in excess of 6000 page views per month (documented, actually probably more than double that) and I would like nothing more than to RECOMMEND vshare to others ... but not like this ...

1. About 7 to 10 days ago I was able to change admin pwd at will ... and did several times ... but as of last weekend I can't change the password at all anymore, unless I do it via PHPmyAdmin. The only single thing that I've done in that time to the templates login/signup etc. files, was to translate certain portions of them - just the safe text and nothing from the code. When I do FTP file transfers my Filezilla Server 3.x is set up to auto-configure for binary or otherwise. Could that be a problem? The auto-config always worked fine for me in the past.

2. Similar to the above, I can no longer utilize ALL of the admin functions. Everything worked fine 7 to 10 days ago, but now I'm finding little quirks here and there that are behaving oddly. For example, now when I go to edit a users package settings, this works from one particular area, but not from another. There are 2 ways to access the individual user packages, once by going through the packages area and looking for a specific user, and once by attempting to edit a package directly from where all of the users are listed. As of today I noticed that I couldn't edit a user's package from the user list anymore. Weird ... why is this happening?
Crontabs also stopped working which caused the Awstats to stop responding as well. Our Server Admin looked into it but couldn't find a definitive cause ... ???

3. This odditiy is driving me up a wall too (sorry, have adhd) which has to do with the rating image ... starrating.gif
This image is obviously the one that gets replicated 5 times in 3 different color shades. Well, I generated my own image for star ratings. It's a little wider, but not by much. The image works in the ratings area alright, after having viewed a video, but not all of it shows. I checked the viewvideo file and noticed that the <DIV> is 220 px. wide which is more than sufficient to accommodate the entire image, times 5 and then some. Yet the entire image will not fit.
I then did a file search for starrating.gif ... but my commerical software couldn't find it ????
I then did a text string search for starrating ... and my commercial software couldn't find that either ????
Finally I did a disk search with WindowsVista Search for starrating ... and STILL came up with nothing ????
How can this be? Clearly the image is being utilized, so there has to be a way for someone to change the image and corresponding files so that the image can be fully replaced. Please tell me that this is NOT a zend optimizer issue because I need to have the ability to add my own custom images to the site. I can understand restricting code adjustments, but c'mon, not images on a script where everything is based on what the viewer sees, to include images, colors, etc.

4. Also in the admin settings ... it won't allow me to add reserved user names, i.e. names that I don't want anyone else to be able to use while creating a new account.

Any help in these four areas would be sincerely appreciated ... !!!
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.