In the attribute editor for the lights there is an option under one of the tabs to turn on shadows maps. This will give you shadows.

The light intensity only determines how bright the light will be, which determines how bright everything in the light's path will be.

Raytracing has to be on for relfections and refractions. That is its purpose besides increasing render times.

The decay of the light will effect how the light decays from its edge. A light with no decay will have a fine line between the lite portion and the portion not lite by the light. A light with some decay will have a nice transition effect from where the lite portion is and where the dark portion is. You should be able to find some good examples of these in the F1 help files.

Simple chrome can be achieved with a Phong, a light gray color to it, a high cosine value, and a white reflection color.

An environment can be reflected one of two ways:
1) you can build the actual environment and up the relfection value and turn on raytracing.
2) You can get an image and map it to the relfection attribute and it will reflect that way. You can map images to many attributes in the attribute editor simply by clicking the B&W checkered box to the right of an attribute and choosing the File node. You then browse for the file and press ok. You may have to display tetures in some instances. (press 6)