As far as question #2, I agree with the comments above. In most cases, people who link to your home page are going to link to www. yoursite .com, without the file name, so following that standard, you will probably get the best results from using that as your internal and directory submission link format as well. To prevent issues, you may want to set up a mod_rewrite to 301 redirect all requests for /index.asp to /. Also, the same thing applies to your subdirectories. Find the scheme that works best, and set up an appropriate redirect and change your links accordingly.

As for the issue with the slash, I have to disagree. There is no difference between having the slash and not having it. All requests to a web server must start with, at a minimum, a slash. All search engines will add the slash to the end of the domain name if one is not present (although Yahoo hides that trailing slash on its SERPs, it is present if you analyze the redirect script). Most directories will do the same. You should get no difference if the slash is included or omitted.

__________________
The best way to learn anything, is to question everything.