I edited the lcars modern theme this morning, (by going into /usr/themes/lcars-modern/images and editing individual .pngs) and everything seemed to turn out fine, except the widened statusbar doesnt keep going underneath the statusbar icons. The included screenshots show how it looks now (before) and and idea of how I'd like it to look (after) does anyone know what i would need to edit so my changes would show the way I want them to?

Here are all the images which make up the top bar:

/usr/share/themes/lcars-modern/images/

qgn_plat_application_status_bar_background.png
qgn_plat_home_status_bar_background.png
qgn_plat_status_bar_background.png
qgn_plat_status_bar_pressed.png

The ones you missed are in bold. You may have already edited the italicized one, but since it doesn't appear in the screenshot I can't tell.

You can find the status bar icons here:
/usr/share/icons/lcars-modern/40x40/hildon/qgn_stat_*.png

edit: I forgot about the close and minimize buttons, which you'll want to edit if you haven't already:

qgn_plat_button_close_normal.png
qgn_plat_button_close_pressed.png
qgn_plat_button_minimize_pressed.png
qgn_plat_button_minimize_normal.png

Everything looks great now! Do you know, is there any part of the theme that I can edit what the background color on web text entry boxes is? Im using the Tear browser and all text entry boxes are black and the text is still black.

Unfortunately, that sounds like a bug with Tear (it takes on the theme's background color, but the black text color is likely hardcoded). You might be able to make a custom CSS style sheet to fix it, but I don't have time to look into it right now. :/

i confirm is a Tears bug and not in theme layout

Hmm could you point me in a direction of where I can find instructions for making a custom theme? I've been meaning to make one but I lost the info for which icons to customize.. i think I might also base it off the echo-wb one with the big scrollbars.

Here a Ian how to and is pretty slick!
woot
http://synthesize.us/Maemo_themes/Modification_HOWTO

Heres a screenshot showing my final changes. The statusbar is the most obvious, but I also changed the rss applet so the bottom of it would actually touch the bottom of the screen. If anyone wants the edited files just let me know and I can send em.