Steven Zahm@ Joshua
The best I can tell you about the strike-through is that is a CSS being applied by the theme or another plugin, likely the theme. Applying the theme confict option and using the raw shortcodes will not fix that. Unfortunately without a link to the page with the issue, I will not be able to give you the CSS to override ride the theme. If you can share a link, I’ll take a look.
The open_basedir issue is being caused by your web hosts configuration. The solution I gave in this post will fix the issue.
The shortcode issue, see this QuickTip on working with shortcodes. My guess is either you have some HTML code inside the shortcode or fancy quotes are being used. The cause for either would be from copy/pasting code from a web page into the post editor while in the visual editor.
I hope that helps!