Does someone know of a site (or if you know, could you please tell me) that explains how long domains are "on-hold" and other things like that. Once i signed up for a week at www.domainsbot.com and it had tutorials on this kind of stuff, but my membership expired before I thought about saving the file for later. If anyone could help me out I really appreciate it

I can help a little.

The following is a press release from ICANN
about releasing expired .com .net and .org domains.
http://www.icann.org/announcements/icann-pr10aug01.htm

I also believe you would find some info by searching the boards.

Goodluck
Trevor