There is a list of the latest forum posts on the right hand side of the portal, with links for "New Posts" and "Today's Posts" on the top. The width, well, that's because people keep posting very large images. I've been mulling it over, and really the only way to keep that down is to have the authors of such large images post only a small one (constrained to, say, 500px wide or less) and have the announcement post link to the actual page with the big images. That leads to problems for things like the newspaper, because that's IC News and Prop and is being posted in the correct forum for that type of RP. It's just that IC News and Prop is displayed on the front page...
You had login problems you say? The only problem I've noted recently is the lack of a logout link on the portal, other than that I've not had any with either FF or IE.