1 PartitionMagic can be used to resize an NTFS partition, as can the open source product ntfsresize. However, I didn't try either one for reasons explained in the text.
2 Apparently use of the -f switch will cause a "tainted" warning message every time any module is loaded. This leads to some ugly startup messages, but they have no real effect.
3 The documentation for apmd is confused about where apmd_proxy should be located, and calls variously for /etc/apm/apmd_proxy and /etc/apmd/apmd_proxy. The location that works with Slackware 9.0 (apmd version 3.0.2) is /etc/apmd_proxy.