Ok, before I begin my rant I just want to put it out there that I DO enjoy, and love both SKS, and Windowblinds, and have for a very long time...however...

I've been working on a couple of skins, and wow, the amount of bugs I'm running into is astounding. Some things can be chalked up to good 'ol Winnders  not wanting to play nice with others, but SKS has been really pissing me off lately.

  I cannot get my rollup button's glow image to work in per pixel border for love nor money. Matter of fact, in one of my other skins all I did was adjust the edge alignments in extra settings for the close, min, max, buttons, and the glow simply broke. They were working fine with the default button glows, but I have circular buttons, and the glows are rectangular. So I made the glow images for them, and the second I adjusted the edge control settings they quit working. At one point I kinda had them back, but no matter how I adjusted the paint margins they just appeared as a smudged line so eventually I just gave up, and removed the images.

  Another issue is the folder bar button mouse over state for the folder bar area itself. I designed a really nice, and unique button style that would have worked had the transparency worked correctly. It seems as though ANY kind of shape other than a simple rectangle, rounded or not, simply looks horrible. This is definitely an SKS issue because the error appears in the image preview as well. 

  Also, there are an abundance of issues pertaining to button text as well. The clock for the primary taskbar works as intended, but I have 3 monitors, and the clock text on the side monitors (aka panels), are bound to the taskbar buttons text controls. IE: if you don't want your clock to constantly change colors, ALL of your taskbar text HAS to be a single color, and font style. 

  The standard menu bar buttons won't display the correct size, and cuts the bottom edges of the buttons off even after adjusting the menubar height. So if you want a beveled edge you have to add image padding, which limits what you can do due to paint margins.

  Don't even get me started on the paint margins, lol. Those are a headache unto themselves. Sometimes they work as described, other times they will tile even if no margins are set for it! Yes, that also includes the dropdown menu selections for "Tile the Middle", and "Tile the Horiz. Middle" 

The "help" tab in SKS is all but completely useless, as well as some of the descriptions for what certain elements do. A lot of the elements, and sections don't even have previews for them. See, we REALLY need to know what an element is responsible for so we can skin it properly. IE: where is it used, does it resize, is it dynamic, or static, is it something that will be frequently seen/used, and if so how? These are what we need to know. Not "Frame Order..." 

Listen, I'm not trying to be a complete bummer here, and cry a river, but I've lost literal days of design work on having to scrap images, and go with something SKS can handle. Not to mention the loss of creativity having to go with some bog standard rectangle image. Please understand that SKS seemed so much more feature rich, and intuitive with the XP/Vista days. There are things in SKS that it just doesn't do anymore, and a few things that aren't even relevant to modern OSes like Win10. 

  I saw, (didn't read), a thread pertaining to something about Win11 support, and so on. Here's an idea, try fixing what we already have before you abandon it for the next new, shiny thing! Take some time, and go back to the roots of what made SKS, and Windowblinds so incredible. Dive into the actual program, and remove what's no longer useful, and add things that are. When's the last time anyone's seen the "places" area of Explorer? Seriously, if anyone knows how to find it in Windows let me know, because I skinned it, and want to see how it looks, lol.

  In part I'm just getting some steam off my chest, that's true, but this post is also designed to give a sort of catharsis to the many skinners facing these issues. I'm sure there's plenty more, but these are what I run into most commonly. Thank you for taking the time to read this pity party of a post, and hopefully it'll put a smile on someone's face, lol.