Trouble with passwd - shadow seems broken...

Hi,

When waking up today my very first Gentoo was ready! :)

However, I have some newbie questions I haven't foud answers to yet, as well 
as a bit of truble.

Q1: When adding a new user, my shadow (I suppose Gentoo uses this by default) 
don't seem to be updated. When using KUser, and exit it I get a lot of 
pop-ups about no shadow entry for the users defined. Using passed to change 
password, I'm told the user does not exist?! I've never had these kind of 
troubles before and would appriciate some help...

Q2: When installing applications not in the Portage tree... How would one do? 
As usual, dl, unpack, ./configure, make, make install ? I'm grasping some 
kind of connection, it beeing scource and this distro is entirely 
sourcebased. Is there any way of managing "external" applications, for 
example Opera?

Q3: After bootstrapping, I was told "1 config file needs updating in /ETC" or 
similar. I read the 'emerge --help config' which said to look for renamed 
copies of the file needed attention. I did not find any such though. Only 
curious file was .pwd.lock which I suppose should be there?

Q4: Having the CONFIG_PROTECT set, is it possible to manually modify config 
files? 

//Pontus