Mark, addressing your 4-in-1 issue:

That flashing red light (4) is normal. At this time the gyro is calibrating, so don't budge the heli or you might screw up your gyro for that flight. If you budge the heli, unplug the battery and retry. After the 4 red flashes the light goes green, indicating that the 4-in-1 has armed the motors and is ready for flight. You'll notice that if you leave your throttle stick higher than 0 throttle, move your trim up higher than 0, have your Idle Up switch on, or do any combination of these, the 4-in-1 will blink red four times to calibrate the gyro, then the LED will be SOLID RED. This indicates that the unit is not initilialized and it will not initialize until you bring the throttle stick all the way down, have your trim at 0, and have you're not in Idle Up mode. After you do this, you'll notice it blink the green LED (if I remember) a few times and then it will be solid green, indicating it is ready. You'll have to hold this position for about 5 seconds and then it will arm the motors. If you change any of these settings while it arms, you will have to repeat the motor arming process.

Those LED blinks are just the way the 4-in-1 tells you what it's doing, and the motor arming feature is another redundancy to keep you from accidently starting up the heli. To be extra safe, I recommend that after flying (and unplugging the heli battery), move your Idle Up switch to ON, so next time you go fly it will not arm the motors until you are ready to arm them, which means after you're a few feet back and you're in position, and then you can flip the Idle Up switch to OFF to begin the motor arming process.

Also, about your flight times...are you using a LiPo charger and have your settings set right? Does it have a voltmeter, or do you have one available to check battery voltage? After the charger finishes charging, check the battery voltage. It should read between 12.4 to 12.6 volts. If it's significantly lower than this (like 11.4 volts) then you probably overdischarged your LiPo one time and now it's coming back to bite you, resulting in poor performance (overidscharging increases the internal resistance of the battery so it doesn't pump out as many volts to the motors) and shorter flight times. If this is the case, you might as well kiss your battery goodbye and look for a new one, it's done for.

Also, I find that the 8T motor gives longer flight times and more consistent performance than the 9T motor included in the Acro kit. The 8T will not have as high a head speed as the 9T because of the gear ratio, but it gives more torque, and since it's not working as hard turning those blades you'll get less amperage draw resulting in less heat, and better motor life. I am yet to burn out my 8T motor or to have any issues with it, and I've been using it for quite a while now (let's just say about 8 bad crashes, just about as many main drive shaft changes, 4 sets of rotor blades and a new tail motor). I'm getting 15+ minutes of flight time with my 900mah batt, and I got 20+ minutes of flight time with my 1320mah batt.