In the Arras theme settings as follows @ http://autoraiders.com

Problem 1 - No of posts that i specify to display never matches the output display, i always have a huge no of posts displayed which is loading the site and making it visitor unfriendly...

Slideshow
Selected Post Type     --"Stickied Posts / Categories    
"
Show Posts   4
Expected result -- (Only 4 posts ought to be shown in the slide show images"
Actual result- My slideshow shows a lot of images corresponding to each post

   
Problem 2 - most irritating and important

For featured post my "post count setting is only "4"
as follows

Selected categories will be shown on the featured slideshow of the index page.
Show Posts     posts
Featured Posts #1  Show
Selected Post Type     "posts"
stickied post --"category selected"
Tapestry --"node based"
POST COUNT     -- "3"

Here is the problem , inspite of specifying only "3" posts to be shown in the featured posts, My website always ends up showing more than 90 posts.
This results in the Home page showing up a Huge list of posts
Huge time to load the site
Many visitors get lost looking at the count.

Effectively , i have tried everything but the number of posts never show the correct count specified as in the theme options..
please help me, !!!!