I'm rather surprised that no one has picked up on or reported this yet, but...
Every client update that comes down the pipe, I find that I have to manualy replace any skin files I created or changed, else everything reverts back to the defaults. Unless you're in the business of distributing your own build this rather frustrates any attempt to actualy make use of our newfound skinning powers.
Having skin settings as a preference might help and lo, someone has done the work for us See the patch in VWR-5059.