You can only have one secondary skill active at a time. However, if you switch to Deadly Gift you can release a few scorpions (or just one) and then switch to another spell/skill. Also, I'm pretty sure that once you apply poison to a weapon, you do not need to keep Poison Weapon active (just switch back to it when you run out of poison charges, in order to re-apply more poison).
As long as you avoided directly targeting Josephine, you should have been able to defeat her with only one shadow potion and the spin attack (if she is standing too close to a torch you should be able to put it out before attacking, perhaps using Telekinesis). Of course that makes the fight very boring, so you may have avoided that on purpose.
Most problems that most people ask about have been brought up before in the forum, to one extent or another. If that wasn't a big deal when many, many people posted about not having any stamina after visiting the cursed abbey (Halberd of the Rock) or a hanging blessing ceremony (no-CD hack not being able to handle the cutscene there), then it isn't an issue now that the forum traffic is fairly low (though for a more than 6 year old game it is doing pretty good).
Also, most newcomers to the forum are not going to see very old topics, so it doesn't hurt to bring up stuff once in awhile.
Resurrecting an old topic is fine, as long as it is on-topic (that can keep relevant information together and make that topic more useful as a reference). If the original topic devolved into chat or went off on a tangent of other problems or suggestions, though, you may want to post a new topic anyway.
