Hi Lazarus and bigbossmalone.
There are loads of good tips and detailed technical discussion at the
Ubi Movie makers fourm (and the signal to noise ratio is very good too)
You can search for most of these questions over there and you will find answers...or just ask again and some of the guys are bound to give a good answer eventually.
Briefly though:
1. Manual.
2. Usually with After Effects or other Effects in Sony Vegas, and using keyframes to isolate the moment.
3. Crop the frapped video with VirtualDub and edit at 16:9 ratio.
4. Not that I have experience with. There are some programs but once you get serious your creativity will be limited by any cost effective non linear editing programme and it is worth it in the long run to get Sony Vegas.
I don't visit this forum very often, so if you want better answers from me or the other filmmakers, please pop over to the Ubi MM forum where the old hands and some new guys all lurk about
