Questions... **NOOB ALERT**

I've just spent most of the day working with vBulletin, for the first time. So keep that in mind, I don't really know what I'm doing with it. ;-)

Some questions... First, is the "update counters" item in the admin panel supposed to be run on a regular basis, or is it done automatically? Should it be a cron job or something?

Next, I have a number of forums that have "Count Posts Made in this Forum Towards User Post Counts" set to "No". I have a RSS feeder application that pumps articles into those forums. However, the user that the RSS app runs as has it's post count incremented. If I run "Update Post Counts" in "Import & Maintenance", the count goes back to 0 for that user. Why is this happening?

Finally, if I install a new style, will the changes I made to the current style (the default) be carried over to the new style? Or do I have to re-apply the changes that I've made?

Update counters is for after forum updates and changes.

The hack you are using does not check to see if the post count should be incremented, it just increments it apparently. That's why update takes them away.

Finally, if I install a new style, will the changes I made to the current style (the default) be carried over to the new style? Or do I have to re-apply the changes that I've made?

No they won't unless you install the new style as a child of the style in which you made the template changes. This is not always pragmatic as the styles may be totally different in appearance.