Whoops, Where are Those Site Themes Hiding?

I am trying to persuade the application pages in a WSS site to look similar to the site pages that are customised by a master page - my approach was to create a new theme, and modify the CSS in that theme using the CSS applied to the master page.

It almost worked, but had a nasty side-effect. Some part of the CSS caused the "select theme" list on the Site Theme admin page to be squashed out of screen space by the left-hand cells expanding too far across the page. The image of the still displayed, but there was no way to remove the bad theme.

Oh dear, what to do?

Then some playing in the IE Developer toolbar revealed a solution - the toolbar allows CSS styles to be edited and applied in the live page. I applied a width attribute to several of the cells in the affected table, and managed to reveal the theme list box in the displayed page, thereby allowing me to reapply the default theme before modifying the new theme.

This difficulty in modifying the application pages to match the site pages is an oft-quoted citicism of SharePoint. During a little research for this post, I have noticed that Microsoft has published a KB article on their recommended server-side fix for this.