@Juha: I could take care of these issues with the examples, if you agree. You are involved in more important topics...
@PeterX: Fixed in r43875. I also added code to adjust the height of the header row depending on the title image position.
As for the patches: Juha is right, providing a proper patch helps the reviewer to better understand the changes made by the user (but your description in this thread was very clear nevertheless).
I assume that you are on Windows: Install TortoiseSVN and install Lazarus trunk - this is the most-up-to-date development version of Lazarus. The installation of the trunk version is described here:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Installing_Lazarus#Installing_from_source_starting_with_a_stable_release. You can install this version as a secondary version in addition to the version that you normally use.
When you found a bug work with the trunk version of Lazarus to fix it, i.e. the modified files are those of the recent revision. When you are finished and your fix is working correctly, right-click on the Lazarus-trunk folder and select "TortoiseSVN" > "Create patch...". This creates the patch file Juha is talking of - it contains the differences of your local version to the version in the svn repository. Upload the patch file to the bugtracker, but the forum is ok as well. Strictly speaking the bugtracker would be better because the reason why a code change has been made is better documented - but with the sample projects this is not so important, and I will add a link to the foum discussion to the svn commit log anyway. (Sometimes new users don't understand what the bugtracker is good for and are putting their programming issues into the bugtracker - then the developer usually tells the user to discuss the issue in the forum or mailing list first).
In order catch the recent version of the Lazarus sources from the server right-click on the Lazarus folder again and select "TortoiseSVN Update". Depending on when you last updated the download will be very fast. In most cases you can use the new version immediately because Lazarus will notice the changed units automatically. However, if published properties were changed or if the IDE was changed you must rebuild the IDE (Menu "Tools" > "Build Lazarus with profile...").
Always update your local repository before changing anything. Otherwise you may sometimes experience conflicts between your version and the server version. In the update log messages, right-click these messages and select an option to "resolve the conflict".
All this sound more difficult than it really is. But believe me, it is really simple. A version control system like svn is the most useful tool in software development.