I only have time to reply back to your reply on part 3 tonight, but it is not a 'bug', this seems to be done on purpose.
> 3) Why is the little orion icon missing in TOR 4.0.4 bundle for Windows? Now
> Tor bundle looks exactly the same as regular Firefox and Firefox GUI looks
> like Chrome. There is very little visual differentiation left and this is a
> bit of a concern that I might accidentally cross containmenate.
So, I really meant, in the system tray (assuming this is Windows), that little Onion router icon (the one that turns yellow, green) is gone....
Since the early versions of TOR ( I still use this one I customized back in 2010 - five years ago : http://sourceforge.net/projects/securitytor/ )
Since the early versions of TOR, each new version has been from the interface/UI standpoint more and more dumped down... almost like way of the Windows 8 "metro" interface, flat design tiles, the whole world moving to cloud first, mobile first, and all that good stuff...
Firefox has started copying Google's Chrome with the massive iteration/upgrade numerical versioning inflation counts, and installing a maintenence as a service forcing and deepthroating everyone to immediately upgrade upgrade upgrade...
Problem is this, now Firefox has gone like full on google, Ads in the browser itself all about monetization, etc....
This is why for non-Tor use, I'm sticking with Firefox 28.0 and will never move to the newer ad infested versions and the change of interface GUI that looks almost identical to Chrome.
it is many steps backwards in my opinion....
And the dumbing down of TOR, at least from the UI/interface perspective is not good.
Sure I'll still use slax/tails, but Tor bundle for Windows by default is getting worse and worse.
prime example, why the heck is noscript turned off by default on TOR, and flash/silverlight/javascript not even blocked?