When I say the hotfix did the trick I meant it allowed me to copy a current skin and then modify. I did try to move my old ones (we were using the Mac skin that we'd renamed to MacCustom and tweaked a little in previous versions) for our PanelBar and when I copied that in and did the renaming of files and such as instructed in the instructions the page would at least render but the MacCustom that was MacCustom in 5.5 didn't look at all like it did now in 5.6. So at that point I copied the Windows7 skin renamed to Windows7Custom and tweaked a little because it was the closest thing to our old MacCustom. I then went into our two materpages that had PanelBars and changed the skin then from MacCustom to Windows7Custom and I'm satisfied with that.
Our grids are a whole other story! When I did the upgrade it changed them all (where ever we had the skin defined) from Mac to Default. This was in a lot of places. So now I'm left with the choice of just updating the Default skin which I don't want to do…I like to copy the original's keep them in tact and then append Custom to the ones I tweak so I'd be left with DefaultCustom. If I do that however then I have to go into every grid and change the skin…and that would take a lot of time. So I'll probably tweak the Default and hope I don't regret that later…at least I won't have to go in and touch every grid (qListView) we have in SharePoint. I wish there was a way to set these globally because we use the same skins throughout the site collection so if we could set all qListViews in one spot that would be perfect (as well as all the web parts skins for that matter)…so that's on my wish list.
So I'm afraid not a lot of real positive feedback there but I at least I can do a custom one now if I want to whereas I couldn't before the hotfix.