Aloha,

Nina, thanks for your detailed reply.  John, thanks for the links!

Sorry, I'm not being clear in my posts.  I'll try and clarify a bit.

Nina, when you say "role based skins" I guess that is technically what it would be.  But, specifically "admin mode" as you say...an admin-mode skin.  My initial thought was that this was the purpose of the "Admin Skin".

Why do I want this?

The elements that are introduced in admin-mode are giving me problems  Ex. The toolbar at the top, container borders, container controls, Admin menu, Host menu.

I agree that they are useful and should be there.  But, since new items are introduced into my skin/design, I would like to apply a different skin when in admin-mode to compensate.  For instance, what happens if I have a skin with absolute positioned DIVs?  The toolbar at the top will either cover the top part of my skin or appear behind it.

Someone else has a problem with HTML being inserted, I'm experiencing the same issue.
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/ForumsDotNetNuke/tabid/795/forumid/109/threadid/24101/scope/posts/Default.aspx

It sounds like an admin-mode skin cannot be done with DNN out-of-the-box.  John, your links eventually led me to http://demo.dotnetnukeskins.com/CPDemo.html  This seems to take care of the control panel problem.  There seems to be some other useful nibblets on that site too.  I'll have to check it out.

However, I would still like to be able to style the admin-mode differently than in "non-user mode".

Here's an example of a site I'm working on.  www.jeewun.com/vsa
When logged in as admin on IE it looks like this...
http://www.jeewun.com/Forum_AdminSkin.jpg

Circled in bright red are some of the issues at hand which I can work around, but they make designing a skin that much more challenging.

My goal is to have non-technical users be able to make simple updates on the sites I create for them and I'm trying to make the learning curve for using DNN's admin-mode as small as possible.  If I can skin the admin-mode then I can tailor to the user more.

Thanks for the advice/comments everyone!
-Tim