I appreciate the encouragement...as of yet I cant even bring myself to look at it right now...what its doing shouldnt even be possible.
I ran into the same problem on 7 but its all beta so I just designed around it for now...but XP isnt beta and the skin ran fine til layers became involved.
Layers are a great idea but they just dont work correctly.They dont blend right,at least not like layers blend in PS.Automask is nice but it also has issues...it leaves pixels from the layer on your antialiased strokes.(because they are not opaque and might have a smidge of color information in them)
I selected just the antialised parts of my images and desaturated them...this helps but isnt perfect.
There isnt any masking function (for elements you dont want the texture layer on)that I can see...other than content margins and automask, and thats not good enough.There are lots of workarounds but not if your skin is translucent.(and they just about ALL are)
It dosnt do any good to fix 1 problem or add new capabilities if it creates new problems. 