Excluding Categories, Thumbnail Display Issues, Breadcrumb Error, Blog Index Problem

1) If you take a look at the homepage (www.project-verde.org) you will see that I have enabled a custom homepage with a staff picks featured project at top (working fine) and a project slider below (not working). First off, for this initial inquiry, the problem is that I cannot exclude categories from slider section.  I am trying to exclude category ID 1, and as you can see the main project listing is still showing.  I verified that the category exclusion works fine on the “Staff picks” widget, just not the regular “projects” widget.

2) Again related to the “Projects” widget I’ve enabled on the homepage, you can see that the “featured images” are loading outside of the contained area for the project listings, and it’s totally not presentable or acceptable functionality.  These are just featured images I set within each project since there is no where else to set these images.

3) If you are on a project page, you will notice a breadcrumb.  For instance if you are on this page: http://www.project-verde.org/project/project-verde-guatemala/, you will notice that in the breadcrumb trail there is a link for “Projects”.  Instead of taking the user to the “All Projects” page, it is actually linking to the blog,

4) Lastly, the blog index page, which is by default being linked to in the breadcrumbs (see 3 above) does not actually show an index of all blog posts like the demo, but rather a single blog post.  I simply created a page called “Blog” and assigned the “Blog” template to it.  This is the result: http://www.project-verde.org/blog/

I have not modified any theme files.

I would really appreciate your help.  At this time I’m really frustrated and regretting the purchase of this theme (simply because of the time it’s sucking from me and I have so many critical issues out of the box). I hope you can understand this.  I’m also under a time crunch to get this project complete this coming week.

Thanks,

Salar