1. You can look around for vga font editor on google. I found one there. It's old and for DOS but it works.
2. PPL supports a lot of formats but PNG is not supported on the PC.
this is from the image.h in pocketfrog (which PPL uses) root dir:
"The PocketPC and the desktop PC versions of this function are implemented differently. On PocketPC, we use the "imgdecmp.dll" decompression library to load different file formats without having to deal with legal issues such as GIF decompression.
On the desktop, we use the OleLoadPicture() function to load image files.
This give us access to a similar set of image formats.
The following formats are supported:
PocketPC: .BMP, .GIF, .JPG, .PNG and .XBM
Desktop: .BMP, .GIF, .JPG, .WMF and .ICO"
3. Leave automatic sprites display on. (Autodraw). You should load all surfaces (LoadSurface) at the beginning of the program and when the mouse is clicked you can SetSpriteSurface() and it will be fast. You can also detect mouse click on a per-sprite basis too.