Newbie questions regarding ssh, databases and apps

[talkingnews]

I feel fairly confident around ispconfig now - I've joined, bought the manual, followed the guide, installed 3.0.3.2 on Ubuntu 10.10 64 on a vps, updated everything, and have 2 sites running perfectly.

Well, almost. In order of urgency:

I can ssh in as the root user. But this isn't good, so I created a new ssh user in ispconfig with chroot jailkit permissions.

I start putty, connect, type username and password, ubuntu welcomes me, and immediately, I get "remote host closed connection". Can't see anything in the logs about why this would be, and there's no other error. The last thing on the screen is "Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law". I never get as far as the prompt, and I've tried both /bin/bash (default) and also /bin/sh

Next up: databases. For some reason, the links to ispconfig's internal apps like phpmyadmin doesn't appear to work (404). Not to worry, I installed phpmyadmin separately, but now I want to add another database under the same username.
phpmyadmin says no priviledges to do this (even though I granted all from mysql command line), but more importantly, ispconfig wants me to create a NEW user for each NEW database. This is going to make copying between databases in phpmyadmin a little tricky!

Finally, and this is probably a more general linux question, but is it possible to dispense entirely with all the "on board" email systems and have all email, alerts etc generated by the system running through my gmail or other external email service? I don't NEED email for the site itself, so running all this gubbins is just taking space.

Thanks, and thanks for a brilliant application.