newbie: gallery questions and upgrade questions

Hi all, I am new to having a website on wordpress. I have a few questions:

1. On my pages where there are galleries of photos, if someone clicks on the “view as slideshow” option, the slide show moves way too slowly. Is there a way to set to a faster speed?

2. I am getting messages to upgrade to a newer version of wordpress but it also says to back up files before upgrading. I don’t know how to do that, and feel a bit intimidated. How important is it to do that first? How important is it to upgrade to the newer version?

3. on the home page, if one goes to the tab that says “our Italy Retreats” a menu drops down. On that menu people have become confused. If you’re trying to go, for example, to the culinary retreat, another menu appears to the right and people think they need to go there. They think they need to follow the whole path. But that gets them to secondary pages for the retreat and not to the main page. So I’d like to find out how to get rid of the second menu (that appears to the right.) Can anyone tell me how to do that?