I only understand parts of what you want to do, however since my eyes are slowly disappearing behind my eyelids it could also be me...

From what I understand out of the star effect question, I would say you draw the first block, then draw the effect and then draw the 2nd block over it... Of course if you want the 2nd block to be in the effect too, then you draw the second block over the first, then the effect and finally put the text in it...

Your second question, yes there is an easier way... Store all the letters of the alfabet (and maybe numbers) in a bitmap, make sure all the letters have the same rectangular size and a clfuchsia background, then u can simply read out the text from the bitmap by using CopyRect and if you write a good function for it you could simply pass text to the function and make the function determine what the number of the letter is in the alfabet (which is easy to determine just look at an ASCII table) and then the function just picks the image it needs from the tiled (font) bitmap and draws the letter transparent over the block...

The lightning question I don't know, however I don't think it's (standard) possible in DXDraw. It could have been a D3D trick however, but I'm not very into that...

Hope this helps a little