Grid 

At this time there are no plans to add additional GUI options for configuring the background. You can change the backdrop by editing the appropriate SetBackdrop call in GridFrame.lua. If you need more detailed help, post a thread on the forums.

It sounds like you may be better served by one of the auto-layout plugins. Or, you could write your own layout. Otherwise, setting the backdrop and border alpha to 0 is the intended method of hiding the background.

GridStatusRole is a third-party plugin, and is not maintained by the Grid team. Error messages or other problems relating to third-party plugins should be reported on the plugin's ticket tracker or download page; even if the plugin is maintained by someone who also helps maintain Grid, it is a separate addon, and any problems with it are totally separate from Grid itself.

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Install the GridStatusRaidIcons plugin.

No. The four characters in "+1.1" actually take up less space than the four characters that are normally shown in the exact same location for someone's name...

Yeah, any time you manually type something into an editable field, you have to press Enter. Profile copies use a dropdown, so as soon as you click something, it takes.

So... something just occurred to me while poking around in the Frame > Advanced menu in-game and trying to think of what the problem could be... you mentioned putting the cursor into a field and typing a value. Are all of the settings you're having trouble with "range" settings (eg. there is a slider bar and a text field) ? After you type a value, are you pressing Enter (stupid question, I know)? Finally, how are you accessing the options -- are you accessing them through the window-style GUI, or the dropdown menus?

When you log in, each addon is loaded into memory, and the contents of its saved variables files (if any) are also loaded into memory. When you log out, the copy of the addon in memory is discarded, and any variables that were listed as "saved variables" are written out to the saved variables file(s) for that addon. In between those events, WoW has zero concept of files. Everything is stored in memory; that's why if you terminate the WoW process, you lose any changes you made to any settings. It's also why you have to reload the UI before WoW notices any file changes, and why you must be logged out of WoW before making any manual changes to saved variables files. In fact, all game data operates this way; hence, you must log out before deleting the Cache.

When you go to Frame > Advanced > Corner Size, no file is read or written to. It's all in memory, until you log out. Furthermore, Grid stores all of its settings in a single table, which is written to a single file.

So, I'm pretty confident that whatever is causing your problem, it is not a Windows 7 file permissions issue. If that were the case, you would see all settings for a particular addon failing to preserve any changes between login sessions, but everything would run normally in-game.

Having said that, do you have access to any other computers? If so, try copying your entire WoW folder to another computer, including WTF and Interface, and seeing if the same thing occurs.

At this point the only other thing I can think of is to ask you to screenshot the debug messages from Grid and GridFrame that appear when you log in with only Grid enabled, change a setting that works, and then change a setting that does not work. I don't really expect to see anything that would shed more light on the problem, but I'm not sure what else to do, either.