Question 2, old vs. new style:
The new style is hideously awful, IMNSHO. All the big ugly button
looking things are confusing. That's definitely the strong first
impression, anyway! :) Overall, way too much chartjunk. Some of the
other changes have merit, though.
Also, I suspect that numbering the steps may actually be
counterproductive. These steps are not at all written in
stone, and as the document changes all those numbers are going to
change. Do we really want people to start referring to "problem in
step 19" when the number 19 may well change the next time someone
edits the document? On the other hand, for a given revision of the
document, being able to refer to steps by numbers is kind of nice.
The attempt highlight the nouns in long lists of instructions like
"check Editors", "uncheck Web Server" seems like a
good idea, but the strong dark gray color isn't the best choice for
this. Light gray should do the trick.
Also, I hope all the special markup is being done with some kind of
stylesheet so e.g. the "draw attention to this text" background color
can be easily tweaked?
In the old style, I also don't like the dark gray backgrounds very
much. Too visually jarring. Backgrounds around all the shell
commands are fine, but I'd suggest a much lighter gray color.