I just thought I would let everyone know about the new betas and mention some of the new features.
You can now create animated please wait screens - see please wait section under Edit Explorer/IE shell parts. You need to create animations in NWA format which can be done from the Tools->Animation compression menu item. This only accepts images stacked vertically so you will need to create your animation as a vertical frame sequence first.
The NWA files can also be used for startmenu animation though old style TGA files will also continue to work but NWA files are much smaller.
Another new feature to SKS is the layers tab on most controls. This allows you to use multiple layers for a given section. These layers have their own tiling and margin settings and can be used to achieve effects which were very hard or simply not possible before. You cannot use layers on window frames yet. Layers do not require the user to have the WB beta as they will also work on WB 6.02 and higher.
We have a document about layers here : https://www.stardock.com/products/skinstudio/SKSLayers.pdf