doy: really? hmm... I set the $myCustomDesktopArea$ (this may not be the correct variable name; I'm not on my home computer at the moment) in themevars.rc and the desktop area DID (I repeat, DID) change to what I entered. I figured that the syntax may have changed from 0.70 to 0.711, so I figured that that was what was initially causing the problem. So, because of this, I didn't expect the manual override to work, but it did (paradoxically). This leads me to think the manual override works somehow differently than the inbuilt desktop area settings.