Thank you so much for yout help...

Well here is the result. It turns out that when I made a custom admin page skin for this site but did not actually set the property text-align to left after setting it to center on page_master (my highest <div> on the layout), I had set <page_master> to center so the next <div> would float centered when width was set to auto. This caused the menu to center as well because I had no css instruction to change it for the control panel. By setting the class .controlpanel to text-align: left; in the skin.css, the the alignment solved itself everywhere... So you were right!

Next, when you replace a skin on a page and set it to change everywhere watch out because you also send that page's icon settings to every page... so I got rid of all the icon references when I grandly used this "apply to every page feature"...  I went back and reset each admin page's icons under Page Settings>Advanced Settings to System Image and then selected the icons that the system uses in the list that appears below ...

Yes the other site was unrecoverable, we just reinstalled the whole thing and five of us are ungrading it back to where it was...

Thanks to you and all of you who are so kind to help us newbies. I love DNN but without you, I would have given up a number of times...