Increased pageload time with W3TC & WordPress SEO

First, I am quite new at this, am using WP 3.1.3m and W3TC (as well as WordPress SEO).

After reading such high praise and having faith, in order to attempt to get this working (again) I un-installed W3TC (never had TC I don’t believe) and spent another day reviewing settings from videos and online instructions.

I finally isolated the errant behavior to the Minify setting which appears to break my site; makes it look like a sitemap followed by some images and some content.

With minufy disabled, the site loads OK.

I clicked on the “Compatibility Test” button and was returned these results

Legend
Installed: Functionality will work properly
Not detected: May be installed, but cannot be automatically confirmed
Ok: Current value is acceptable.
Yes/No: The value was successful detected.

In Chrome, I used the PageSpeed tool, got a score of 51/100 with the following Red-flagged items

Leverage browser caching
The following cacheable resources have a short freshness lifetime. Specify an expiration at least one week in the future for the following resources:
http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-page-numbers/panther/wp-page-numbers.css (expiration not specified)
http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/css/reset.css (expiration not specified)
http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/epanel/page_templates/js/prettyphoto/prettyPhoto…. (expiration not specified)
http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/epanel/page_templates/page_templates.css (expiration not specified)
http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/images/background.png (expiration not specified)
http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/images/block_b_h2.png (expiration not specified)
—–and many more like this

16 file here, also red-flagged
Enable compression
Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 173.8KiB (72% reduction).
Compressing http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.4.4 could save 50.3KiB (65% reduction).
Compressing http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/epanel/shortcodes/shortcodes.css?ver=1.6 could save 21.8KiB (82% reduction).
Compressing http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/js/jquery.cycle.all.min.js could save 20.5KiB (75% reduction).
Compressing http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/style.css could save 17.8KiB (76% reduction).

18 red-flagged like:
Combine images into CSS sprites
The following images served from doctoreq.com should be combined into as few images as possible using CSS sprites.
http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/images/block_b_h2.png
http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/images/button_grey_left.png
http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/images/button_grey_right.png
http://www.doctoreq.com/wp-content/themes/Polished/images/dropdown_top.png

I installed and activated WP-minify. How can I fix the red-falgged categories?

Once I have this straightened-out, I’ll change the DNS and re-enable the CloudFlare service (now that I discoverd how what to enter as “host” in the FTP software (FileZilla) so that I can access my site.)

Help?

Thanks,

doctorEQ