The miserable user's hack will allow you to setup a usergroup called miserable users. If you look in the settings, you can do things like make the pages take longer to load, make them just get a white screen once in awhile, etc. Be VERY careful when you use it, because if you end up assigning the wrong group as "miserable", you can make your regular users really not want to visit your site.

Once you have your miserable-settings in place (read up on the thread/files on what everything does), you basically assign users to that usergroup and they become miserable. Forum permissions are VERY important here, because you're creating a whole new group.

Honestly for the time being, I'd leave the hack installed but come back to it in a couple of weeks when you're a little more comfortable with vBulletin, because it does take a decent bit of know-how to get running properly.

Next part.

The AE detector will just post a thread in a private forum telling you that two users have the same login. You can set admins/mods to be exempt from it, but it won't harm your account. It's just to let you know what's up. Here's a screenshot of it running on my forums:

http://www.sevenstring.org/chris/aedet.jpg

Why it's useful, is not only does it tell you who has multiple accounts, it can also help if you've banned someone and they do what most banned people do - just reregister. Keep in mind that sometimes people live with other people that visit your site, so after awhile you'll get used to knowing who shares a computer with another (valid) member of your board.

Next!

The license thing here is just something everyone has to verify one time and then you're golden. Like I said in another thread, some of the coders here have spent HUNDREDS of hours developing mods and add-ons for vBulletin for nothing more than a hearty Thank-You from people like you and I. Validating your license is one way of keeping people who run pirate versions of vBulletin from being able to take advantage of their hard work and get free mods for the software that they essentially are stealing from Jelsoft. Believe me, it's well worth it, because being able to post in the forums here is somewhat of a privelage and as a result of the validation stuff, the forums here are a lot more useful than an open-to-everyone type of place where you'd have 100 people logging in asking the same damn question 200 times in a row.

Basically the community here is awesome, and the fact that we jump through those hoops in the beginning helps a bit to keep it that way. Nobody thinks you're a scammer or anything like that, so don't worry about it.