jimmerd

Try the Auto Thickbox plugin. It works great for me.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/auto-thickbox/
I see there’s one more advanced and higher rated but I haven’t used it.

The nice thing is it’s automatic. You upload a bunch of photos to a post and they’re automatically done as thickbox (which is a flavor of lightbox).

Well, you might want to look into Custom Post Types for that.
http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/04/29/custom-post-types-in-wordpress
is a good intro.

Or you may just want to start with Categories. If you assign a category to a post, it’s easy to make a page that shows all the posts in that category.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates

That sounds like a file or some files got garbled on install/update. First thing to try is to download a fresh WordPress and FTP in all files all over again.
Since this is happening in the Admin section, I’d start with the wp-admin folder.

Rob and Marcel: both solutions are great. The two together, even better.
How about combining? Add a class to the link and style that in the admin header? (I want that notice to really slap me in the face; I’ve neglected to turn it off a time or two.)

add_action('in_admin_header', 'nostromo_sebih');
function nostromo_sebih() {
    if (!get_option('blog_public')) {
        $title = apply_filters('privacy_on_link_title', __('Your site is asking search engines not to index its content'));
        $content = apply_filters('privacy_on_link_text', __('Search Engines Blocked'));

        echo "<p style='float:left; position: relative; top:-4px;'><a title='$title' href='options-privacy.php' class='sebih'>$content</a></p>";
    }
}

// 'Search Engines Blocked' Highlighter
function rbd_search_engines_blocked() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
a.sebih {
	font-weight: bold;
	color: #FFFFFF;
	background-color: #CC0000;
	display: inline-block;
	padding: 5px 10px;
	border-radius: 5px;
}
</style>'; };
add_action('admin_head', 'rbd_search_engines_blocked');

This plugin worked great for me:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/auto-post-thumbnail/

wpAdm’s solution was PERFECT for me.
When I changed the permalink structure, I was fine EXCEPT for custom taxonomies, which led to 404s.
I just put wpAdm’s code in functions.php and all is fine now.