It would be rather lengthy to explain all the settings but if you have already imported all the start panel you can send it to me I will be glad to set up margins and extras then return it so you can see how and what needs to be set!

Haha im speedy!

Thanks ! I have a couple questions tho:

1) In the Paint Margiins Tab, under the area for Tiling top, bottom, left, and right, Should I leave the Tile areas unchecked and at "0"?

2) Also in Paint Margins section there are TWO scrolldown boxes. Should I set the top part to Center Middle Section and set the bottom part to Center (true size, no margins)?

ablebodied,

Welcome, I too am new to skinning, still working on my first.

a few things can make life a little easier (for me anyway):

if you leave a little transparency room on your canvas you can also move the image on the canvas to help line up properly to. This is also helpful for certain areas too like the start menu. if your top, bottom, left, and more programs images are against the left edge of the canvas the start menu will render on screen all the way to the left edge of the screen. But if you leave 5 or 6 pixels of transparent canvas to the left of the images it will pull the menu out to the right a little bit, and actually looks better IMO because it doesn't look like the menus left edge is being cut off by the screen.

I would suggest that though it seems a headache, you should play with the margins. They really are easy to understand once you start and it won't take long. open other skins in SKS to look at for reference. of the ones I have looked at the majority of images are set to use Stretch Middle Section / Paint with Margins. Personally I find this easier, someone like voidcore could probably use center/true no margins rather easily due to experience, but I have noticed that your images need to be sized and positioned on the canvas precisely for this to work well. The margins make things easy because images do not have to be the precise size to render properly, stretching will do that for us. 

how margins work is really simple. Basically they tell SKS what portion of the image to NOT stretch.  take my button below. it has some gloss to the top 1/3 of the image. if you stretch that button vertically the gloss will begin to pixelate into lines and look horrible. To solve this you would use your top margin and bring it down on your image until the margin just covers the gloss line. now when the button stretches the gloss will stay crisp and only the middle and bottom of the image will stretch.

and likewise with this image. this is my pressed button. when it is stretched the lighter areas on the the left and right look terrible. they pixelate into steps toward the middle. so I use the left and right margins and bring them into the image to the point where you see the red overlay (not part of the image, added to show the margins) this way the sides don't stretch and turn into steps.

Text margins are simple to, they move the text around within the area. the text margins tell SKS what areas of the image to NOT render text in.

the last thing I have noticed is Patients young grasshopper. If you want your own images from scratch your going to have to learn how to use the margins.

Good Luck and enjoy the process, OH YA, don't forget to make a pot of coffee...or 2 or 5, your gonna need it...lol

Thanks all for your suggestions. And Thanks for the Margins overview. My thing is that I dont want my images stretched at all if possible since I want to have the freedom of creating images with patterns, textures, reflections, etc. and I dont want them distorted. It seems that stretching is ok (As in XP) if your images are solid, but like I said, I dont want to limit myself to solid images. The reason the Center option appeals to me is for that very reason. I want to create a start panel and have it look EXACTLY as it does in photoshop as i created it. So i simply want to create the images at the exact size that they would display on screen when used and center them so theres no stretching, margins, etc. to worry about. I would REALLY love it if Skinstudio wouldnt require that a single panel consist of seperate iamges being imported. I dont know why on earth the designers of Skinstudio decided to make it like that. I wish I could just create ONE image of say, the entire start panel and import that ONE image. Hopefully a newer version will allow for that much simpler way to skin.

I think you meant 'patience'

His advice is like gold

You need a url address you upload your image to somewhere like imageshack there are a good # of free hosts and then insert the url  in the box.

mine are hosted throygh my website so the names will be different of course but it will read something like this

ex.....http://audiomasters.net/host/azulss1.jpg

hope this helps

WB will never support one image start panels, If that is what your having probs with then post a screenshot, teh start panel is one of the easier sections of WB to skin so if your having probs, lets see it and we can go from there.