You could probably have the back replaced very easily... Buy the iPod, wait a year (until your warranty expires), find a broken 4th-G iPod on eBay, pop the back cover off both em and swap em!
OK, IE is crap... Do you even know how many security holes there are in IE!? A LOT!! Firefox is not ugly and not slow if you configure it properly... There a lot more extensions for Firefox that add more functionality to it than IE... You would be surprised what this browser can do!
Is your computer plugged in? A very common mistake these days... http://www.xperties.net <-- Watch the flash video and you'll know what I mean! (WARNING: Mature Language)
To show it as a background: <body background="pic.jpg"> To just show it as an image: <img src="pic.jpg" alt="" border="0"> To link to it: <a href="pic.jpg">Picture</a>
Whatever you do, DON'T even try installing Gentoo... I tried it the other night and it took forever, even though I followed the documentation on it! Try either installing Fedora Core 2 or Mandrake if you want something easy to learn with!