can't get you right on question one. could you please rephrase it?
as for dead units - yes, they are "out of triggerzone".
basically, a little was changed to old triggers in the patch, so do expect the same triggers behaviour in 1.0.1 as you had in 1.0.0. Just to make mission designers job less difficult.
ps: as for smoke signal life time - it's 300 sec.