framing and third party redirects

I know what you mean. This is the next level to cloaking your affiliate links.

You can do this by either using an iframe or cURL (look it up). With either technique though, your website will feature in the address bar. There is no way to control what features in the address bar at the vendors site apart from basic (?var=val) queries appended to the link.

That's how affiliate links currently work.

There may be another way where if the vendor uses cookies after a visit to track affiliates - you could have cURL possibly view the site, create the cookie, then redirect to the site. That would means nobody would even see your affiliate id in the address bar at the vendors site. Of course, that's a half baked idea.

On the tracking of your own clicks - yeh, what you do is in your script which redirects to the vendors site, you create a block of code which will log the click either in a database or log file. Then, a step further would be to write something which can display that data in a nice format. To develop even more on that idea is to track other variables which can come with a click like how the person reached the page in which they clicked your affiliate link etc etc

Again, you have to do this on your own server. You can't control other people's servers.

Hope that helps.