1. When Airodump is collecting packets, it says that the packets it is collecting are WPA encoded (I am sure they are WEP only)
Yeah. known bug.
2. 100K, 250K, 600K packets: No amount seems to get past the 12th KB in the crack. (I know it's not an exact science)
128 bit WEP = 3 bytes IV + 13 bytes key. Aircrack actually computes votes for the 13th keybyte but the info disappears just after being printed.
Deftronic: it is normal, you're capturing beacons (unencrypted frames sent by the AP to make itself known).