HI, the problems is that DNN 4.9 started adding paragraph tags on the rich text editor. That's why you are having extra spaces between fields. If you check under the question footer / header of the field, and click on "Source" for the Rich Text Editor, you will see this. You need to remove anything here to get rid of the extra spacing.
As far as the timeout issue in trying to set back to the default DNN skin, can you try to restart the DNN application under HOST / Settings and see if this fixes the timeout issue? Thanks. -- David