In the past, I have sometimes had issues with fonts in skins not appearing correctly, or menu items getting truncated, graphics drawing incompletely, or other minor and irritating quirks with skins on my dual-monitor system.

To solve these types of issues, I have tried updating video card drivers, reinstalling fonts, deleting fonts, changing the size of application windows and using SkinStudio to alter the skin to make the issues go away. These techniques have been successful to varying degrees, but rarely resulted in complete success and almost always resulted in more hours troubleshooting than was prudent (just ask my wife).

Nikos (adni18) helped me out recently with one of his skins by suggesting that I:

1. Apply the default Windows XP skin.
2. Reboot.
3. Apply the troublesome skin.
4. Reboot.

This solution worked perfectly, and saved me many hours of frustration.

I haven't seen these simple troubleshooting steps posted in a FAQ or as a forum sticky, so I am posting this in case it will help others. More experienced skinners and users may consider these first steps an obvious place to start, but I had not considered them until Nikos pointed them out to me.

Thanks to Nikos for responding to me both by email and in the comment section of his skin. Without his expertise and willingness to help, I would still be tweaking the skin in SS.

-Jeff