i download skins and all that comes up is the base skin.
i've made sure that the place they download to is the same as the place where i look for them... what's up?

do you have a really old version of winamp?
Is yor hard drive full? (the skins get extracted to the TEMP dir).
Do you have a temp direcorry?
Ran scanddkis/anti--virus?

all that is go, and i think i have the problem, but not the solution... i am only downloading 17 - 20 k's, not 400 or whatever the real size is. I can download other things fine, but not skins... do you know how 2 fix that?

I had a similar problem recently - sometimes .wzs (or whatever the extension is) files come inside a zip file, I don't know why, but I had about a half dozen like that, so that when I selected them it came up as the base skin, until I noticed in Windows Explorer where it said "Files/Folders in Archive: 1". So I unzipped them from there, and then the .wzs files worked just fine. So check to see if that's the problem too.

Try right-clicking, selecting "Save Target As...", and save it to your "C:\Program Files\Winamp\skins" folder. Then use the skin browser (Alt+S) to select the skin.