Need help with Massive News theme

I’m working on the design for a new site, and I want to use the Massive News theme. I’m running into some odd problems that have me stumped (and I’m very new at this).

I’m working on the design offline using xampplite, if that matters. Anyway, here are my specific problems:

1). On the front page, instead of an image with each post, it is showing a chunk of text from the beginning of the post in place of the image. Very weird.

2). On the individual post pages, I can’t get the image to be properly left aligned. The text starts below the image (leaving a huge chunk of white space next to the image) no matter what I do.

3). I would like to make the rotation time on the “features” slideshow go a bit more slowly, but I can’t figure out how to make each article stay up there a few seconds longer.

4). Not sure how to use the sideblog section or what to do with it.

I can’t offer a link to the blog I’, designing, since it’s offline, but here’s the Massive News demo: http://www.wpelements.com/demos/massivenews/

And here’s the download link to the theme itself: http://www.wpelements.com/downloads/themes/MassiveNews.zip

Thank you so much for any help!