Josiah,

The print and minimise options are skin objects that are present in the template you're using. To remove these you need to turn them off in the module Settings > Page Settings > Basic Settings under the Collapse/Expand and Print options. Rather than turning them off on all new modules you add, you can set this as a default by checking the "Set as Default Settings" within the module Settings > Page Settings > Advanced Settings, click update and they'll be removed plus they won't be visible in any new modules you add.

Regarding the additional DIV elements, you're contending here with what the developers of the modules and templates have included in their files. If it's part of the skin you can make changes to the relevant .ascx files in the skin/container directory for your template, making changes to the modules is a bit more tricky and you'll need to research the files for each module you're using.

A lot can be done to improve skins and containers, generally if it's a template the "one size fits all" approach generates slightly more code. However if you are creating a new template from scratch the best place to start is to mock it up as flat HTML, keeping it as clean as possible, and then inject the skin objects in their relevant space, this technique will generate cleaner skins.

Hope this helps,

Rick.

One other thing that I use that helps is the FireBug plugin for Firefox (http://getfirebug.com/) so I can inspect the code and see what's going on, this may help you identify the additonal spacing issues.

Rick.