1)How do you mean?
edit: are you using subSilver? Yes your right in that case. I put subSilver up by request from someone. it hasn't been altered in anyway for about a year when the site was hosted on a different sever (lycos to be exact). I replaced it with smartDark (which is the same as the frontpage theme), but there were no light themes.
You can change themes in your profile
I will fix the link on smart dark.
2) yes, I should be able to if you so wish. Problem would be though, if the topic they reply to has a really long name, then it will have to be truncated so I'm not sure how useful it will be.