Problems with registration

I am having the darnedest time trying to get checkout working. When someone tries to check out, they are presented with a login and a regististrationpanel, all is normal - You can log in to your joomla account via the login, however if you try and register, no account is created at all. Or at least, I can't log in to check out. I noticed someone else had a very simular issue, because they had CSS buttons enabled, however I don't. what might be going on here?

Also, is there any way to make it so that if you log in / register it redirects the customer right back to the checkout page? it just ends up at some random blank page instead of continuing the checkout process.

well I looked through and what was actually happening was an activation email I did not know about was being sent to my email address- which I had not checked. The page is not blank as if it were a php error without the display errors variable enabled, it was a blank article, so all I should technically have to do is redirect the shopper upon login to the checkout page, and on redirect to a page explaining that they must activate their account from a link in their email, and provide a link back to their cart. my only other concern is that when I first activated my cart was empty. Maybe my session timed out though. I am using the newest version of hika shop against 2.5, also. I assume there is also a redirect setting upon activation? Also, registration just refreshes the page, so I have to look around and see if I can find a way to get it to display the activation article. Here is a link to our store, if you wanted to provide any insight: http://ellsworthamerican.com/jupgrade/index.php/subscribe?id=191 . I have adjusted the emails to point to nobody important so it is safe to check out with fake test credit numbers (Please don't use real ones)

Huh. Now I can't seem to either. Maybe I changed something- Do you know how to make it so that the state field on registration does not show up as a *? I looked for any javascript errors, etc, didn't see much, I found out in the source that the state field is type="hidden" .. why? I have United States set as the default country and that is not published since we only provide digital subscriptions out of country.

Well the interesting thing about it was that it was happening before I unpublished it. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't show at all. Even so, it's showing up now somehow. Maybe because I republished it. Weird issues, but it's okay now! Thank you for your patience!