Whats up with the Tauntauns on Hoth, they don't sound like Tauntaun's at all!

You knew and read enough to know that it broke items down.. that should have been warning enough to maybe research things a bit more before doing it on your only weapon...

Make sure your companion is not out on a mission, they do the crafting as well as gathering, and they can't do both at once. You can only que multiple crafting(5), not missions and crafting.

you didn't pay $5 for the pre-order, if you look at your order more closely you'll notice they took $5 from the game price and applied it to the pre-order item, possibly due to some legal thing or Origin not being able to have something for $0 in an order *shrug*

Nothing is needed to play the early access other then registering your pre-order code that one time when you first got it. You will not receive access to play in the early access until you get an email from Bioware telling you when you'll be able to start, at which point you will then be able to log in at whatever time the email states. Unless you pre-ordered back in July, it's probably unlikely you'll be playing today, or even tomorrow. As was mentioned when you pre-ordered you'll gain access to "up to" 5 days early access(7 now if you pre-ordered early), in other words, that could be 7 days(today) or 1 minute of early access.