1. As Bmaczero said, gluing objects is straightforward, and as long as you orientate the cane properly it should be fine. If you need the character to do something special with the cane, say walk with it as if crippled or something, then it's best to animate that as a seperate character model with cane included.
2. You can re-texture an object, so if you have a variety of character textures you can swap between them. There is a plugin that would allow you to specify areas on a texture and then affect the colours - this would save on having to make lots of different textures in an art package. Can't recall the name, but it's by Wolf, one of the EZ range.
