I have kept at it with no luck. The skin displays correctly in the viewer window (with sample taskbar and start panel) but when I select it, the start panel and taskbar are unskinned. The standard skins included with 6.3 work correctly. 6.0 works. The problem arose in the upgrade from 6.0 to 6.2.
I have tried an upgrade install from 6.0 and an uninstall and reinstall of 6.3 with no luck.
If I change the uis file to point to one of the xpstuff.xp files from a skin that otherwise works, the taskbar and start panel are still unskinned, so there is something wrong with the main uis file. I want to solve this problem because 6.0 did not work with Firefox 3 and 6.3 does.
The skin I want to load has not been updated to include the alternate per pixel window frames.
So why don't I just use the skins that come with 6.3? I could (I use diamond on my laptop) but the font sizes that come with most of the skins posted are almost always microscopic on my monitor. The skins seem to all be designed for 1024x768 screen resolution. I have tried altering font sizes in the uis file for the new skins, but I guess I don't understand all of the changes in the language because I get awful results.