Lots of little MT admin issues

I’ve been trying to refine my Movable Type setup lately and I have run into a number of little problems for which I can’t find easy solutions online. For example, there appears to be a bug in MT 3.2 that permits junked trackbacks and/or comments to show up on a blog. The workaround seems to be to delete them, but I don’t see this listed as a known problem.
Another issue that’s been plaguing me for some time is that when I post an entry generally on the first build, the category for the item does not appear. It will appear on subsequent rebuilds, but again I don’t see this listed anywhere as a known problem and I don’t have a workaround for it short of rebuilding each time I post a new entry, immediately after posting (which is a pain).
Another thing is I added Brad Choate’s MT Authors plugin recently so I could list the contributors to a blog more easily in the sidebar (the blog in question is Uncle John’s Blog). For some reason, though, the tag lists authors from my installation who have never contributed to that blog. They’re not associated with it in the database, so I don’t really know how to track the error.
Finally, I recently decided to repurpose my Above the Fold test blog as an announcement site for people blogging on my system. I set up a “newsbox” index modeled after the output that appears in the MT interface (here’s the raw output), and I changed my configuration to specify that URL as the newsbox content, but MT refuses to grab my cotent and insists on showing the MT newsbox instead. Curiously, if I set the configuration option to disable, that does work, so the system is responding to the setting, but something is preventing it from superseding MT news with Mediajunkie/Above the Fold news. I’m stumped.