Shameless,

I can only tell you what i have observed while using skinstudio. In your first screen shot you show the arrow image misaligned with the grey panel showing through. This does not happen on my computers.

I stand by what i originaly said.

Shameless,

Ive just been trying some alternative settings with the left hand margin and it appears that -90 is acceptable, anything less than this has no effect affect on the skin.

P.S appologies if i sounded a bit negative in the previuous message. I dont pretend to know everything about skinning, I was just giving my opinion on what i've found works for me.

mitchec,

I sincerely hope that you didn't take my post showing the examples of your skin as a criticism of you or the skin. I did not intend at all to imply that, in fact, quite the opposite. I'm sorry if I left that impression.

I don't know everything about skinning either, but I am determined to learn as much as I possibly can. Several of us have been wrestling with this More Programs panel and trying to make sense of what is happening for some time now. The reason I made such a lengthy post with all the illustrations in response to you was to show that there was new information that came out because of your post.

We all, I think, learned some new things we had not known about the behavior of these items due to the content margin settings because of this thread. At least it is information about them that I have never read anywhere, and trust me, I have looked very hard. I got excited about it and wanted to post it as soon as possible and with as much detail as possible. In my enthusiasm, looking back now, I realize that it could be interpreted as a harsh criticism. I'm sorry for that. it was not intended that way at all.

I really do thank you for your post. Without your post, I would not have checked this out and made this discovery, and it has helped me, at least, a lot. So thank you once again.

Wow! This is a great thread. Its good to see all the great suggestions in here.

I can only tell you what i have observed while using skinstudio. In your first screen shot you show the arrow image misaligned with the grey panel showing through. This does not happen on my computers.I stand by what i originaly said.

Mitch,

that first screenshot was taken with the skin setting exactly as I downloaded it from WC. However, the reason it probably looks different to you is that I took the screenshot with the mouse cursor hovering over the MPA graphic before the More Programs menu popped up. I had to set a long delay using Tweak Now in order to get that shot.

The reason you and almost everyone else doesn''t see the grey highlight is that the MPA graphic and the menu graphic cover it up. The left edge of the More programs menu aligns itself to the right edge of the MPA graphic so the part of the highlight you can see in my screenshot will only be seen for milliseconds before the menu pops open. Most people will never ever see it.

I didn''t post that to show the highlight as some kind of glitch in your skin. The reason I posted that there, along with the other shots, was to show that the left content margin has practically no affect on the mouseover color location. Only the right content margin setting affects the highlight.

As for the MPA graphic being slightly misaligned with the background, that''s exactly the way it was when I opened the skin. If you say you aren''t seeing the misalignment on your rig, I believe you, and I think I may even have a reason why you might not see it the same way I did.

One of the things we''ve discovered is that the location of The "All Programs" text is not only dependedent on content margin settings for the panel background. The location of the text also depends on the font setting used for the text and the screen resolution setting of the monitor. The location of the MPA graphic also depends on the text location, so if you and I run different screen resolutions and/or have different system font settings, the location of the graphic may be slightly different.

Which is why I got so excited about the discovery about the different affects of the right and left content margin on these elements. Think about this for a moment: I got the MPA graphic to line up perfectly using two very different content margin settings! using L:neg 90, R:40 as one setting and L:neg 104, R:0 for the other setting. This tells me it''s possible to not be so dependent on the resolution or text settings. I think I see, if not a formula, at least some better ways to control the location of the highlight and the MPA graphic so we are not so dependent on screen resolution or font settings to precisely locate these items in a skin.

I am still doing some experimenting, but I feel one hell of a lot closer to a reliable solution we can all use than I did 2 days ago. And I might never have looked at all this if you hadn''t posted, so thanks again.
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I hope you're right Shameless this skin which does some serious altering of the Start Menu has misaligned All Programs graphics when I use the ultra-compact 16x16 icon substyle...with 16x16 icons, though it shows pretty nice in the preview. http://www.guiolympics.com/skins2004.asp?library=33&searchtext=kewk&category=WindowBlinds&sort=date&order=Descending

After Essancay posted his last comment I decided to have a look at the start menu icon size. Previously I had been using large icons. After changing to the small icon size I got the misalignment problem. Setting the left margin to -90 as you suggested fixes the problem for both icons sizes.

That would be cool if Shameless found a standard setting for the left margin