Hello,
I've spent about 3 hours now trying to figure out why there is this big image default icon appearing on the front page of my website above the featured articles. Big ugly floder icon. I went into the menu and turned everything off and tried to turn everything off in the category section that had the word Category on it. and the damn thing is still there.

Also, the articles are appearing as a duplicate on the page below the correct article with a white background.

And the third problem is that all the formatting I did does not show up. All the paragraphs are one big blog.

From your description the big ugly folder image should be the category image. You could turn that option off through your Category parameters.

For the other two I will need a link to your site to check it out.

Good morning (here anyway :-)
Thanks for your offer to help.
I know joomla pretty well so K2 shouldn't be that difficult but it is just frustrating because I know how to do what I need in Joomla itself. Then when I go into K2 it just isn't as intuitive.

OK, here is my test site I'm doing this in. www.archerymonthly.com/test/

You can see that ugly folder icon right under FPSS. I've looked everywhere I can think of and turned off everything I can find that has "Category". I looked in the category settings and the menu settings.

Then if you look further down the items are appearing below the "Welcome" article I have in as a place filler for right now. They have this white background and are not even supposed to be appearing there.

Then, if you go to the "Basics" menu item it is a longer article and as you can see it removes all the formatting I took the time to put in. I started out with plain text and then put in things like paragraphs, some bold and things like that and none of it shows up. But if I go into K2 and look at the "Item" at least the paragraphs are still there.

Found most of it.

For the folder icon it was in the category setting. "Category view options"

As far as the double articles appearing it was because I had the K2 content module assigned to the page. I removed that and it is good.

Now the only thing left is the formatting. My articles/items are still just blocks of text with no formatting.

When editing the item in the backend and Save it afterwards does the formatting remain or it is stripped on Save?