okay, i'm slow. Vector shapes for the buttons?

I don't know about skins, but I've seen Mormegil use Corel to make icons, and I'm impressed. But a good point with icons is that in vector format, you can resize them without quality loss.
But for skin, dunno, but to each his own.

Looking forward to the day where skins will be in vectors though. Lite and better quality. Like Mac OS X, I guess. Gotta give Apple its due on that one.

imagine a close button (red filled circle with a white X on it). when you import this from Illustrator at tiny size (for Winamp2 for example) you will get crisper result than doing the same in Photoshop.

paxx: both KDE and Gnome/Nautilus support vector graphics (SVG) for icons. also a step into the right direction.

Moshi: yeah, i can see that. Since you don't have 'pixels' per se, you don't have realistic shadows or gradients, so you would only be able to scale before you rasterized the image. Once you dodge/burn the lighting and shadow on something like an 'Aqua' style button, you are stuck with pixelation when you resize as always.

If you were doing something that had a cell-shaded or non-realistic style it would work, and a lot of the most popular stuff is. I can see how it would be helpful in laying out the skin to begin with as well.

To each his own.

That's exactly why I like Fireworks bakerstreet. I can keep the elements of my skin as freely editable vector shapes, but use bitmap effects such as shadows at the same time. As you edit the vectors, the effects update in realtime.

Take a look at my WindowBlinds skins. They were all made in Fireworks using vector shapes with various blends and shadow effects. If I decide I want to go in an change the size or shape of any elements of the skin, I can do so instantly without having to recreate things from scratch. The same applies to changing colour schemes.

I then don't need to do anything extra to 'rasterize' the vectors as images are exported in exactly the same way as you would from Photoshop. I guess I just like to have detailed control over every element of a design from start to finish, and not have to revert back to an old save just to get the shape of a button back the way it was.

Grey: yup, with the kind of graphics you are making, that would work. All the gradients you use are within the ability of vector graphics, so you only have to rasterize when you save the images. For stuff that is more realistic, though, one would have to rasterize long before. Because of this, I keep all my shapes stored as either vector paths or shapes in a separate channel. Same difference, really.