If you don't use Skin Studio then the only other way is as you are doing now...to edit and adapt an existing skin...[that's how I started at it in just about every skinnable app that I have done].
Just remember, though, that before you upload a new creation, be sure that no graphics in particular remain from the original one you used to create yours.....

i dont know about conquest10, but i cannot use skinstudio 1.20 or 1.29c on my work machine.

both generate illigal operations, and crash. from memory it tends to report "cannot access memory at address FFFFFFFF" (6 or 8 F's, not sure off hand). this seemed a bit random, but i never had the program running for more than about 1 minute without it exploding

one of the versions, i think it was 1.20, produced a cascade of identical error messages, a new one every few moments. they were cascading diagonly down the screen from the center towards the bottom right hand corner. they reached there, but kept on appearing.

after a couple of minutes of this, all the resorces on my machine were eaten up, and windows started to get most excited. clicking on the message boxes was no use, because they kept on appearing. in the end i took skinstudio out with ctrl_alt_tab

currently i dont have skinstudio installed. if there is a way to get some form of crash log out of it, i can re-install one of the versions, since i suspect i can reproduce without any problems

this is running on:
500mhz AMD processor
128 meg of ram
video: Cirrus Logic 546X 1.62

running programs included:
window blinds 2.21b - using blue toast skin
object bar 0.75 - using tweaked default classic skin
outlook 2000
word 2000
coolplayer
object edit
IE6
excel 2000
powerdesk 4 pro
teraterm * 4