Those are all issues that I occasionally encounter but haven't been able to reliably reproduce, and therefore haven't been able to fix them. However, none of those are likely related to you losing the settings. I wish I knew what to do to fix it (or even repro it).
If you haven't yet upgraded to 2.6, you should. There have been a lot of bug fixes since 2.4.4.
Roger Martin
Creator and Lead Developer of Gallery Server Pro