I was having the same problem with the slider. This is what I did to fix my problem getting the slider to work on my self hosted blog.
Following the advice in the forum, I made a “Home” page and set it to static, set it with “front page” as the template. I did a post with a featured image that I re-sized to a 750px width. I selected featured for location (under the featured image box). I unstuck my post that I had set to sticky. Still wasn’t working. Then I finally noticed after going through everything again, I reopened my “Home” page edit, and right underneath the template selection in page attributes there is also an “order” selection that had a default 0 in the box. I changed that to 1 and it fixed my problem. I hope this helps.
