Problems with theme

Hi all, first post here, and sorry in advance for my english, i’m italian ^^

I’ve just started using WP with some results so far, but now i’m stuck with some problems, adn since i’ve to finish a site within a few days, i’m a bit worried 😀

I installed WP locally (using XAMPP as APACHE/MySQL database), all works well. I installed this theme (named “Dreams”), but i got 2 main problems: the large slider doesn’t work (and once downloaded, the theme doesn’t even contain the sample images i saw in the demo!). I found the code part of the slider, but knowing nothing about php or WP code in general, i cannot solve the problem. I guess that slider has to retrieve images from articles (it’s made to show last articles images), but i don’t know how. If i simply add an image to an article, it doesn’t show up 🙁

After some scrubbing of .php files, in “functions.php” i found a code part with a tag “img src”, though empty, if i add an absolute image url (making it look like <img src=”http//…”) then it works, but i need the slider to retrieve images on its own – every image from the article that owns it.

That string is:

<div class=”slider-image”>
<?php $screen = get_post_meta($post->ID,’slide’, true); ?>
<img src=”<?php echo ($screen); ?>” alt=”<?php the_title(); ?>”width=”963″ height=”272″ class=””>
<div class=”slider-post”>

From what i understand, “echo” displays something (“($screen)” in this case i guess), but i don’t know what ($screen) means °_°

Second problem: how can i erase all elements from the right sidebar? In “widgets” there’s nothing already and i don’t know where to look…

Thanks in advance for reply!