Try the forums over at allshadow and you should find the answers to most of your questions (theme creation and adding fonts)-there is a really helpful search function in the upper right to locate what you are looking for. Also as far as themes go, try Freddy Reyes site as there are a lot of really good themes available to download that are easier to install if you are new to customizing windows mobile than trying to replace all the needed window files. Good luck

Load Active sync to your computer, connect your shadow to it via the usb cable, let it sync, then hit file explorer and choose where you want to load the file to and drag it from your desktop to your phone-I have mine on my storage card. Once the file is on your phone, locate it on your phone's file explorer in the start menu and open it-it is a .cab file which you open on your phone.

As far as for the message icons, you could just add your new image files to the \windows folder and name it whatever you want and then edit the reg to point to it-I did this for an emoze account I have.

Check this post here for the start bars Start bar to change colors...as far as the icons, you have to edit the image for each application, I think you can find them in either \windows\start menu, program files folder, or wherever those images reside.

Yes, you can convert an image into another type. I recommend opening the image in an image editor and then file>save as>save as type and select which type you want to save it as. You could also just rename the file with the extension type you need i.e a bmp called image renamed to image.gif or whatever.

Not that I am aware of....what I would recommend is shortening the ringtone down to around 20 secs using a ringtone creator like audacity.....of course, this is assuming you are using a full lenght song for the tone.

You need to add them to your sounds folder in your applications folder on your device-then you should see it under text messages, alarm, alerts, etc.

I had a similar issue when I first got my phone-I could not send/receive sms or mms messages. Messed around with settings for a week and finally hard reset it per tmoble support-have not had any issues since. I think the rom upgrade to version 1.11.531.5 is supposed to take care of that also