Neal-UK, thanks for the compliments, and for signing up! I'm especially glad that you initially found the site through a search engine. I hope this means my SEO efforts are beginning to pay off.
To answer your questions, yes I created the theme. I'm a bit busy with other clients just now to take on more work, but feel free to shoot me a PM if you can wait about a week and we can discuss it.
Thanks again, Shelley_c! Customizing the threadmarkers has been on my to-do list for awhile now, but work for other clients while trying to add some content and features to SpaceBuffs' homepage has sort of delayed that.
On the IM icons, the matting is the same color of the alt1 and alt2 backgrounds. Though it could be I neglected to update them when I initally designed a somewhat lighter color scheme...I'll doublecheck. The Skype icon looks pretty bad when using SkypeWeb graphics...not too much I can do about that, sadly.
Thanks for the friendly thoughts and critique! It's always appreciated.
Oh, I also wanted to add that I plan on creating a few different skins, each with its own unique theme: Martian Landscape, Jovian Atmosphere, Moonscape, Rings of Saturn, etc. I'll bump this thread for critique on those once I get them done.