Well I know it's
required by HTML but apparently not XHTML... however.. it's good practice to stick with that standard as it really is the first visual element you should be touching in the page. <title> and <head> come after <html>
I'll keep working on the theme based on suggestions... they may be variants in the future... we'll see. I have a lot of other work to do, so don't necessarily expect instant changes but also don't think I've given up

I will continue to improve it.
Not all the of the padding is perfect yet and the header is still being worked on... the previous author reused some classes that now used a bit differently so I have to expand that a bit... this is why you may look at some things and say "why is this style like this?"... probably because the author reused 'row2' where he should have used 'row_header' or something.
I've been stripping out a lot of excessive <td>'s as well... because that's not how you design web pages. Not that I expect anyone to really be able to tell but this can result in a speed up in load time.