Save me some time..Please!!

[dre41]

Hi..I'm a newbie. Well sorta, just upgraded from 5.1 to 7.3.4 so you'll be hearing a lot from me until I get on my feet. I primarily do commercials for radio but I also make tracks. This will be my first attempt to incorporate Protools for music production so I anticipate a few bumps along the road.
My first question, I would to split a mono signal into a multi mono signal,,,can you tell me how? I have a purple audio mc77 which is a single channel leveling amp. I would like to come from the purple to analog input 1 on the 003 rack. Then output that signal to a pair of analog inputs to track. The reason you ask!! In my work all effects are "printed" or not in real time. So in order to print stereo efxs, I need a stereo channel.
I have used an aux input and mapped it to a stereo channel but it only increases latency. My hope is that I can set this up in I/O just not quite sure how to do it.
My second question,,,I have a great deal of audio files that were created and edited on 001. When I went to import they all appeared as text files. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance, I look forward to sharing thoughts with you all.