Thanks for your answers.
For the search results I managed to change to 15 results only.

For the part with the banner I did as you suggested (changes both in header.php and style.css)but it didn't fix the problem.
The hovering grey thing is the same as the one you get when you are over a category. I guess the way the page is generated makes the php script stronger than the html...lame explanation
I will try to translate my html code in php style with $html.= and see if it works...or give up the link and leave only the banner.

Anyway you really deserve keeping some of your original ads in the site but I must tell you that after I hit my first million visitors we might have to renegotiate