Hiya Jane, the majority of stuff you are talking about is accomplished, not thru the program itself, but thru graphics. If you are savy with a graphics program, you can make your own backgrounds and tabs, there's a skinning readme file in your backgrounds folder.
As for changing the color of the font on the tabs, that's easy.
1. Open the folder containing the skin background you want to change the font color of.
2. In this folder is a background.ini file. Click on it and it should open up in notepad.
3. You will see two lines
Text Color = and
ShadowColor = with a bunch of numbers, which are the RGB values of colors...for example
TextColor = 255 255 255
ShadowColor = 0 0 0
Gives you white text with a black shadow.
Hope this helps
Oh yeah that skin out there that is "clear" is a problem unless you can click on the text. All skins need some "substance" to work correctly. You might want to try one of my Aero Tabbed skins...they're pretty translucent

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