a. In the reply window I would like to "drag & highlight" for editing purposes.
I'd like that, too. But it seems that when I added the JavaScript that enabled the extras (eg quotes, images, smileys), the ability to drag was lost in the process. I'm guessing it has something to do with the "onclick" function, which records the cursor position for the inserting of text.
But that seems to only happen in Internet Explorer. When I tried it with Firefox, I was still able to drag and select text. I'm going to hire a pro JavaScript programmer to write a better script for inserting the little extras, which will hopefully speed up the page load. In the process, he might be able to clear up this issue, too. In the meantime, you might try using Firefox, or see if the beta of Internet Explorer 7 doesn't have the same problem.
Also, in IE6 you can select text by clicking the starting point, then shift-clicking the end point. Not as nice as dragging, I know, but it beats repeatedly banging away at the backspace key.
Subsequent replies are squeezed further and further to the right until sometimes you get only 3 or 4 words a line
This is a visual representation of the message threading. I'll probably go ahead and shrink the amount of indent per message, which will help a little bit. I also saw on one forum where they kept all messages the same width even as they indented, which looks nice, too.
If you want to eliminate the indent altogether, you can actually do that now. If you scroll to the bottom of this page, you'll see some settings for "view type" and "sort order". Change the sort order to "newest on top", and the message indenting will be gone.
Regards,
Jonathan