HELP A N00B WITH CUTSCENES... :(

I got the RPGMaker XP trial downloaded 4 days ago and I'm hooked. I love it, and I'm already knee-deep in a project. I've been watching tutorials, playing with the program, getting a good feel for everything. I pretty much know how to do everything at face value; it's the quirks of the program I don't understand.

The first two days I started playing around, I made a really quick game called "My First Adventure". It started up fine, everything worked properly, and after I finished my "quest", I successfully initiated a transport (Entering a tent), and a brief cut scene. The NPCs went to bed and I was free to explore the room. I did have a couple hiccups I want some advice on:
When I saved my game and continued, the events that moved or disappeared had reset themselves. I assumed this was because I told the events to delete themselves rather than whatever it was I was supposed to do. I also thought it had something to do with switches because it was very consecutive branch heavy because I thought the switches were really fun.

I dropped My First Adventure on my third day with RPGMaker and I started to make a real RPG. I've actually planning on making a game, so these questions have more urgency.
First off, I got ahead of myself and started with a cut scene I'm not using until later in the intro. The scene is a king talking to his daughter about the dangers of leaving the castle, but she wants to go outside anyway. She eventually runs off to the balcony, and I was having him walk off as the screen faded to black, but for some reason, he'd eventually turn around and start walking left. I double checked the commands I gave him, did a couple of tests, and he kept going left. Sometimes he would rush into the room even though I didn't turn up his speed. Sometimes the princess re-appeared out of the room (where she ran off to). I wasn't using switches; all the commands were on one event controlling the other.
I have NO idea what I did, but I woke up this morning and it worked. The scene works like a dream and I love it.
When I got to the scene following that one, it went down hill. After figuring out how to set up a panoramic background and building the balcony, I compiled a scene where the princess is mulling about when a lower class friend of hers shows up out of the blue. In this scene, I tried using activation switches, self switches, giving the commands to another event, but no matter what I did, the princess always froze when it came to moving. I checked over and over to see if these tiles were walkable, and they are. I looked up to see if anyone else had this problem, and someone said they solved it by turning "Through" on. So I turned on "Through".
OMG, I created life (again)! After the scene ends, I have it set so it'll teleport me to a different map I made of the city so that I could check to see if all the events work right. BUT now my hero won't move. Dx
So I turned Through on after confirming those tiles can be walked on. I don't mind using Through for cutscenes, but I can't have the player going through walls.
Please help me...

Also, since I am a beginner, any tips, tricks, or important notes would be greatly appreciated.

Alright, I understand how to do that. :)

THAT was my problem! I just figured it out; I wanted negative space outside the room to be un-traversable so I set the blank tile to 'x'. That explains why the cut scene and the hero wasn't working.

I'll post additional details if those things don't work. :) Thank you so much!

One more thing; I don't know much about Variables. Could I set up that after a quest, let's say you get 1 point into variable 001, and you get more points for doing other quests into variable 001 that I could have an event at the end of the game that, based on the amount of variables you've collected, it could show multiple endings?