HI,
I am impressed and appreciate your effort,
I wish everybody use the same method as you used.
The 1st and 2nd problems, they both happen because; the AJAX dock cart you use opens the shopping cart with AJAX loading. if you notice the URL, it doesn't change at all.
If you browse the original URL of shopping cart:
www.domain.com/shopping-cart (or just
www.domain.com/cart i don't know which one you use) You won't see these issues at all.
I am not blaming the developers of AJAX dock cart about this issue, neither them nor us are responsible for this issue actually. Because we both assumed our clients will use original Virtuemart. It is just not okay to use both AJAX dock cart, and our VM Template together. We develop templates, they develop extensions and we both make them compatible with Virtuemart itself. Not with other 3rd party extensions/plugins/modules. Because it would be dead-end. There are thousands of 3rd party Virtuemart extensions around, you can't make something be compatible with everything.
The only solution for this issue is; disabling the AJAX loading while opening the shopping cart through AJAX dock cart. So the shopping cart should be opened regularly. I don't know if there is a module parameter to let you do it easily. If there is not, then you would need some code editing to disable it. Or ask for support from AJAX dock shopping cart, simply ask them: "How to disable AJAX loading while opening the shopping cart through DOCK cart module, i would like to have ordinary link for shopping cart page".
Thank you.