but would ask not to fill it with too many clichés.
Oh, so not full of red-headed leprechaun's, sitting in shamrock patches, shillelagh in one hand, and a big old pint of Guiness in the other, hah? To be honest, I'm not really in this one for the long haul. I was going to just basically do what Fuzzy suggested by recoloring a skin, then adding a few elements of my own -- start button, a little something on the top of the start menu, maybe something with the scrollbar drag bar and progress bar and sending the adulterated skin personally to sueech if I had an e-mail addy for him/her.
The uninitiated don't understand all that goes into creating a skin. It's not just the big things that jump out at a person that go into it -- there's all the little stuff, toolbar icons, adjusting fonts and their colors, and the system colors -- the system colors and the font colors have to coordinate well or the skin is totally useless - you can't read anything in the menus! It's aggravating figuring out how to make these elements play well with each other, figuring out what each one does and how it affects the others.
If there is no passion for the finished outcome, the skin isn't going to see completion. A skinner has to be committed to the subject of the skin, otherwise it's like babysitting somebody else's kid all the way through the teen years....if there is no love, somebody is going to get hurt.