OK... I got #2 sorted out. Basically, on an Ubuntu box, the user that was created during the OS installation is not really the root user... The actual root user does exist, but we just don't know what the password is to log in as root. So I had to change the password for the root account and the log in as root user => this enables me to access all the files/folders that I had been locked out under my own user account.

I'm still looking for answers to #1 and #3 though...