disappearing titles and changing drop down menu box sizes

Three more questions/problems:

1) Some of the product titles in the side boxes disappear after we edit (any other) product in the Admin area. We "update"--go to the page, and other titles lost most of their characters. We do seem to notice a pattern...so far the only ones to lose part of their titles are the ones with quotation marks used to signify inches in the title. Is this a PHP issue?

2) Our categories need to be slightly longer, but the drop down menu boxes are not wide enough, so the characters appear outside of the box. They run right off the box. I have tried to find the right css rule to change, but haven't been able to find it so far.

3) I would like to get rid of google maps, but I don't want to mess up anything else. Can I just delete the code on the "about us" page and leave it alone on the globals file? Or should I take it out of both places?

Thanks,
Michelle