Upgraded and confused

Upgraded this blog to Blogger Beta, because I liked the idea of having categories and the expandable archive. Spent about an hour tonight categorizing some 200-odd posts. However, the entire thing seems to be written in XML, which I know nothing about, and I've got two bugbears with it so far:

1. I can't get it to display my old java progress bars, so have had to resort to a graphic instead
2. Can't figure out how to put my old banner back up the top - every time I paste it into the template, it moans about my breaking the XML code.

Anybody got any ideas?! And yes, I did try nicking the code and pasting it back into my old blog, but it didn't seem to work very well.