Re: No Left Column
In a normal Tiki installation, the "never" choice lasts until the next time an admin person goes to the Look & Feel admin page and changes it to "always" or "user decides." In other words, this is a dropdown list, so the column visibility normally can be changed at the whim of the administrator. If this wasn't the case at your site, then apparently there was a problem of some kind there.
Even if the menu no longer displays because the column it's in is turned off, this doesn't affect the pages the menu points to. For example, just input (your domain)/tiki-admin.php in the browser address bar to get to the top admin page. Often the page names like this are the same as the php files in the Tiki web root.
-- Gary