Modifying Post Appearance on the Frontpage

Hello!
I use Artisteer for my theme creation needs with WordPress, and for my purposes it works well for 95% of the things I care about in the theme. There is one nagging deficiency however in that I can’t set the way posts appear on my frontpage the way I want them to.

I threw this theme together this morning and put up a few quick test posts and sample pages. You can view it here.

You’ll notice on the frontpage that articles show their content in its entirety, and if a featured image is not set it does not appear next to the title (see Test Post 3). What I want to do is this (for the frontpage view of posts only):

1) Limit the post word count to the first 50-100 words.
2) Automatically show a 150×150 image, taken from the first image in the post, in place of the featured image if a featured image is not manually selected for the post.
3) Retain the linkable title (which should link to the individual, full post) and meta information.
4) Have it set up so that the “featured” image is to the left and the title/first 50-60 words float to the right. (I dont want to have to manually ad a “more” snippet to each post).

If I’m right it’s a matter of modifying one of the php files or templates somehow, but I am woefully ignorant in that regard. If someone could help, that would be great. Here is a link to the theme .zip will all of the associated files: .ZIP

Thank You.