Strip Tags off Excerpt, reformat with CSS

I have a website where I use another content management system for the majority of the site, but have WordPress setup also. I added an SSI tag into the home page of the site:

<!--#include virtual="/wp-last-5.php" -->

which causes the file: wp-last-5.php to be parsed and the last (5) post’s titles, date-stamps and excerpts to be inserted into the HTML page, (and use the CSS styling of the rest of the site).

The file wp-last-5.php contains:

<?php require('/path/to/wp-blog-header.php'); ?>
<?php query_posts('showposts=5'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div style="margin: 4px 0; border-style: solid; border-color: c4c4c4; border-width: 0 0 1px 0;">
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a><br />
<small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> by <?php the_author() ?></small>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
</div>

<?php endwhile;?>

…and works fine.

The problem(s):

1). I can not get strip_tags(), str_replace() or other php string functions to strip the <p> and </p> tags out of the excerpt.

2). The excerpts end with […] but this is not clickable (for the implied “Read More…”). I’d like to end each excerpt with a link to the post.

Is there a reason:

<?php strip_tags(the_excerpt()); ?>

will not work (in the loop)?