1.)  see #32044 (up2date ignores de-selection of emacs)
2.)   Since I am bandwidth impaired, I observe the following.

Every four hours my dialup drops connection and there is a two minute
(ideally)
drop in connectivity. Since I was registering at the time rhn_register
pretty much
hung up going from box --> firewall --> redhat. There is no apparent
attempt to
retry. I had to break out of it and re-do.