Haven't looked at this thread in months, so I never saw the last few questions. Probably way too late to be worth answering now.
No idea about challenge kills not counting, would be a bug with PN that's deeper than I would know how to fix.
Anyway, between the time I originally posted this and now, a variety of modernized replacements for PN stuff have become available, so I decided to update the main post with information about those.
While I was at it, I also de-scripted the old patch, as RoyBatty suggested, in case anyone still wants to use PN proper.
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