I drew up this new design a few weeks ago, but I’ve been sitting on it for a while working out some kinks. Currently, it has some big problems with what seems to be an IE6 bug. I’ve stabilized my HTML with this design, so my next few redesigns shouldn’t require anything but style changes (also makes creating alternate style switching possible).

Anyway, this is my idea of getting something a little less stark up and running. I’ve also for the most part switched off of using the style transparencies. Maybe the .GIF effects will render faster.