Nina, thank you so much.... I am a true web designer... so I'm using HTML (dreamweaver) to build the skin... i let dnn do the heavy lifting

Not totally related, but I found that a great help were two tools - The IE Developer toolbar for window Explorer allows you to view the DOM and see what styles are applied to particular elements.

I would also HIGHLY recommend installing a number of extentions int the Firefox browser - there is even a couple  to  run IE in a Firefox tab.  There are a host of very useful developer tools in their extentions site -  One of the most useful I have found is "inspect this" Highlight an area in a web page and choose "Inspect this" fromn a left click and it opens the DOM to the exact place you hightlighted, you can see current styles applied, the order or stylesheets that were applied etc.

Also remeber, you may need to create your own classes and pseudo-classes to control the look of some elements on your skins.

I got that one too - I have about 20 extentions installed -a few will probably go away soon, after I have totally settled ont he ones that I will use permenantly.  - they have saved me DAYS of tracking down CSS and Javascript errors, and have been very handy for linvestigating the structure of bot dnn and non-dnn sites as well.