Problems with skins

[Artix]

Hey guys I'm new here..

Anyway, when I use skins, I have weird boxes appearing beside my groups. A screenshot:



See the 'boxes' beside the groups? It's kinda weird because it's appearing on every aMSN skin that I use. May I know how to remove it? Thanks.

[dyzzi]

well, as i've answered like a gazillion-bajillion times...


i'll now express it to you in EXACTLY the way it should be expressed.


This problem could have spawned one of two ways :

There are EXTREMELY NOOB skin designers out there who FORGET TO ADD BLANK PIXMAPS for the box borders

OR

Older skins that have never seen an update in years have likely never needed to add the blank pixmaps due to older versions of aMSN during their last update. (i'm taking a guess on this one because if they had no borders in their screenshot, but yet there ARE borders after someone else uses the skin... that just doesn't make sense unless aMSN used to not pull from a default skin)

moreover,
what happens is when you download a skin that appears to have no borders in its screenshot.. what usually is the problem is that most older skins have no blank pixmaps (as stated above) and with the newer versions of aMSN (i believe the older versions didn't do this) if there is no file present for a given pixmap, aMSN automatically grabs whatever is in the default skin folder to replace what is missing (in order to provide full functionality).

The default skin HAS box borders.

Thus the problem presents itself.

The solution, however, is to simply go into your default skin folder (the folder in your skins directory for aMSN that is labelled "default") and go into the "pixmaps" folder inside there and find the files named:

box_up.png
box_down.png
box_left.png
box_right.png
box_body.png
box_upright.png
box_upleft.png
box_downright.png
box_downleft.png

select them and delete them.

NOTE: if you like the default skin you might want to copy the "default" folder before you butcher the one and only original you have.

that should fix the problem right there. Now all old skins should work the way they were intended to work (shy of whatever problems occur from the upgrades to the latest aMSN... which i have no idea lol)

the only thing is that if you want to use the default skin again with the borders just rename the copied default folder to something like "aMSN default" or something just so long as it is not named just "default" and select it as a separate skin altogether.

I doubt his little tutorial i've provided is a huge bag of help... i really just don't feel like formalizing it this time lol.



OH!!! and if deleting them doesn't solve the problem.. open them up in photoshop or gimp and just make them 100% transparent and save over them... that should DEFINITELY fix the problem if deleting them fails.

[Artix]

Ahh thanks for your help.. That made sense, so I kinda deleted the box_(something).png files in the default folder.. And then all my themes became like this:



So is it that making them transparent is the way to go? (and then I have to redownload the default theme to get back the box files?) Thanks.

edit: never mind I found the files and I made them transparent, and now it works. it's just the spacing that I'm concerned but it's okay. Thanks anyway

[jester]

usually if a skin is missing an image or file, aMSN will grab them from the default skin
if the default skin is still there

dyzzi gave good info