Select Options instead of cart AND prevent default shipping costs

[dudestation]

Hello all,

I have 2 urgent issues / topics in PS 1.7.4.0 - and I did read thru all available posts regarding the same or similar topics but could not find any solution for PS version 1.7.4. All these other posts seem to apply to PS 1.5 or 1.6 only.

I am still preparing my shop before go live and the issues are:

1) on the product page, how can the "add to cart" action be replaced with "select options" so the customer is forced to select product options before being able to add to cart ?? In case of products with attribs a prior selection is mandatory I think.
PS does not seem to offer such a thing.
I know there is an option to hide the cart for products with attribs, but this does not work in PS 174 unless catalog mode is on.
which in turn hides the prices again ... so not really useful / wanted.
There must be other people out there having the same issue with PS 174 ? Hopefully  !
Anyone knows if there is a module which can do that ? Since I am no developer...

2) How can it be prevented that PS 174 default adds shipping costs to a product added to cart ir NO destination was chosen ?
Guest order without login for example. Totally does not make sense such thing is happening. PS applies the highest shipping costs (checkbox in prefs) without knowing the destination. In fact it should be like this. Products can be added to cart and the  shipping part goes on top / is calculated once the customer entered the destination, not before.
Maybe also a module available doing the trick ?

Thanx for reading this and hopefully getting some replies.

Best Regards
B