make your start panel mathmatically correct...(a good tip for beginners.) for example if the userpane is 450 wide
then make your proglist and places list 225 each wide.....(half of 450)
also take a bottom piece out of the progs list for the moreprogsbackground (around 22 to 25 high, up to you ...)
the moreprogsbackground also has to be 225 wide...
and also make your startpanelloggoff (the bottom part) also 450wide...(the hight is up to you, but sometimes tooo high is not good as it pushes the menu higher up the screen)
after all that, make sure that you have the correct numbers manually put in (extras section, when you click on any part of the startmenu, check the tabs and youll see the extras tab) for the height and width in skin studio for each part of your startmenu.
And also dont forget the painting margins, these help with stretching, you can adjust the painting margins so your image dosent stretch and look horrible.
also, sometimes you have to restart for some changes to kick in... when i skin vista, there are times when i restart several times a day..... so i dont go online until im done skinning for the day....saves money. lol dialup.
i hope this helps somewhat.......... also, check out some skins and see how the creator made them, take note of margins, sizes, ect check out everything, open every tab and button ect and find out how it happened and why.......
