I can't really help you out regarding the skin creation, but I can help out with some usful icon creation tips
Firstly, Creating good icons isn't easy but can be a lot of fun when you get the hang of it. It requires a lot of practice and time to get your own personal method and style.
I use
Microangelo http://www.impactsoft.com/ for the majority of my work, and then sometimes
Icon Collector Graphics Editor http://www.greatowl.com/ or
PhotoShop for any extra colour alterations and tweaking.
Generally stick to a certain style or theme, if your doing a 'set' or pack.
If you want to add an extra level of 3D'ness to them... make sure you get your lighting right, you generally want lighter colours in the top left, and darker colours and shadows in the bottom right, if your going for the 'traditional' 3d look that is.
And remember if your doing a IconPackager set try to make all the icons look consistant and you will need around 50 or so icons in there minimum for a whole system set, although some sets offer over 100, with all the extra file types covered as well.
IconPackager icon sets or 'packs' are just .zip files renamed to .ip files so that they can be automatically installed by IconPackager.
Check out: http://w1.864.telia.com/~u86404543/cci/iconlinks.html and http://www.virtualplastic.org/html/link_ic1.html for a massive list of great icon sites... have a good look around, get inspired and get pixel pushing.
There really aren't that many icon-making tutorials out there, but here are two of the main ones (for mac, but the concepts are the same):
http://www.tcp-ip.or.jp/~s-iga/tips/tips&tricks.html
http://www.iconfactory.com/howto_home.asp
They teach the basics... so you can take it from there and develop a style of your own.
If you want to get into the new funky XP icons... you might want to use PhotoShop for the majority of the work (using layers), and then import them into
IconXP http://www.aha-soft.com/iconxp/ or
GIF Movie Gear http://www.moviegear.com/foricons/index.htm to convert them into the XP icon's various sizes, and save them as .ico's.
Here are a couple of good tutorials for creating XP icons:
http://www.aha-soft.com/articons/faq/q5.htm
http://www.foood.net/icons/tutorialxp1.htm
http://www.moviegear.com/foricons/icontut.htm
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/library/en-us/dnwxp/html/winxpicons.asp?frame=true
If your looking for freeware XP icon editors you might also want to try these two apps:
Icon sushi: http://towofu.s5.xrea.com/soft/e-index.html
SnIco Edit: http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~meijer/
Good luck & I hope this helped...
