Hm, I can't reproduce this. Any chance the language/dictionary for the text isn't set properly?spell check isn't working, or it finds miss-spelled words, but doesn't offer suggestions
Don't worry about your icon comment, no offense was taken. I'm not sure very many people like our blue crystalized naked Nisus manYet I have not managed to decrease the size (vertical) of the footer. So, I end up with this rather substantial lower page margin. Could this be a bug?
As for your footers, you should be able to grab that top border and just drag it down. However, you could also try decreasing the bottom page margin using the Margins palette. If neither of these solutions work, perhaps you have something in the footer that is forcing the footer to be large? For instance, if your line spacing is set higher than 1x, it will require spacing for that.