I need help with Mbox Mini and ProTools :|

[Lefterman]

Hello everyone! As I said, I have some issues with Mbox Mini + Pro Tools LE version 8.0.4. I am an utter newbie unfortunately, and picking the above setup might have been a bad idea eventually, but anyway.

I bought the Mbox Mini 1 week ago and installed the drivers just like mentioned on the instructions booklet. Then I proceeded to the "Record yourself" section using a guitar, always following the book step by step and when I got into Pro Tools, it didn't display my guitar's waves. Anyway, these are the issues I have had so far:

a) When plugging the guitar and starting a new Guitar-Tracking session, it doesn't really seem to be able to read the guitar.
b) I can only listen from 1 monitor when plugging the guitar.
c) I don't know if it's normal, but it seems Mbox Mini Control Panel is useless (I have activated my product), since I can't seem to be able to do anything there, only click on "Manual/ Updates/ Support/ FAQ/ Register" buttons, not even able to change Buffer Size/ Sample Rate.
d) Whenever I go idle, something seems to be malfunctioning, because if I go active I cannot listen to music as it stays at 0:00 on any program I try, not quite freezing, but unable to proceed. Same thing happened on Youtube. Then I tried launching a game and it had almost 5x loading times, and when it finally launched.. well you get it, no sound, plus it had framelag as if mini-freezing every 2 seconds.

I also had a friend who was studying ProTools in school recently take a look at it, and he was pretty confused by the looks of it :| After some time, he managed to make both monitors play, by adjusting the panning some way, I don't quite remember.. He also made the guitar readable by using a pretty different approach than the Avid's booklet.
But even after that, the guitar's sound was terrible with any effect he tried; my 25 Ibanez distortion sounds way better for instance :|

Well, in the end, it went idle again, and finally I lost the settings my friend tried, setting me back to the beginning again..

I would really love to hear some advice, very many thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Lefteris

PS: These are the specs I believe may be needed, ask me if you need something else too.
Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 @ 2.53GHz
4.00 GB RAM
Windows 7 32-bit
Mbox Mini
Pro Tools LE, version 8.04
Asus P5N-D Motherboard