Hello guys, good day.
After seeing this complains about the skins in "small icons" mode I decided to test things.
There's no need to get angry here thought. John, you're a great skinner but I believe you're mistaken in some of your complains up there, right now WB7 is in bata stage, so all WB7 skins shipping with it should be considered in beta state too. I got all skins mentioned here and test and tried to tweak them all to investigate what could cause the reported issues.
I looked into it a bit further, the content margins for at least 3-4 skins, including Diamond and several Aero clones that I made for SD are set horribly wrong. They should all be set to 4 for top and 4 for bottom for taskbutton, Rebar gripper, Quick launch and Tray Icons to make the taskbuttons appear correctly with small or large icons applied.
The settings you suggested here are not right, they would make the taskbar look better when in small icons mode but will affect the taskbar when in default mode (I believe most people use the default look), the Windows 7 taskbar, by default have 40 pixels of height, using the suggested settings will make it too big. The small icons mode is a new feature on Windows 7 and right now what skinners can do is make it looks usable as possible without mess with the default look that most users use.
After loading the skins, I believe they look pretty good based in all controls we have.
Also the reason the start button looks low on some skins is because whoever made the new 7 start buttons did not make two part buttons with the overlay included over the top of the taskbar, looks like they went the easy route and made one piece buttons which honestly look terrible.
Not really, all that you need to do is enable the setting "Use Vista style positioning" on SkinStudio (Start Button > Button > Extra Tab), this will center the button making them look like Windows's Aero. with Corporate, there's not a fix for now cause the start button design I made but I'll try to find a fix as soon as I click the "Post Reply" button.
I am amazed that the included skins in SD's flagship product are so terribly defective in Win 7 mode as big a deal as the new OS is.
Thanks for supporting my work, as some of the skins mentioned are mine. Way to go positive feedback.
Hopefully someone who knows what their doing will give the included skins another look and a good fix.
Again thanks.
I tried and tweaked the skins myself in here to check the things I said here but I heard they where updated and may come out soon.
Here are some screens from the tests: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/416294/misc_37v43jxdl/tested_skins_435sgf15sakj.png

Take care,
danilloOc