Welcome to your first post. And SOOO many questions.

To be honest the Star Alliance Forum might be a more suitable place to ask your questions. However for days MOST threads on this Forum clearly do not belong here, and the moderators seem to select a few at random using a dartboard to relocate, so why not overlook another??

You will find some quite superb info here for you:

BlondeBombers Star * Alliance Member Benefit Comparison Chart:
http://members.home.net/deercroft/starall01.html

And be warned as far as I know * carriers work on a calendar year accrual basis, but typically the North American carriers at least allow the status earned in calendar 2001 to be good until end Feb 2003. See recent posts on the "Baht Pass" thread here for more detail on that.