The default blue background in DVDA 2.0 is quite nice. However, the default yellow highlight color is awful. Fortunately, if I change all four colors for color set 1 and color set 2, I can get something I like. However, this requires eight changes for each menu and each submenu for every project. This is a lot of repetitive work, and several times I have burned a DVD only to find that there is a submenu somewhere where I forgot to change both color sets.

I looked for a way to make this change permanent, and it looks like I must edit the "default.xml" file in the "default20.thm" zip file. I did that, and it works. However, I kept thinking that there has to be a better way.

I then discovered that when you save a DVDA project, there is an option to "Copy user and theme media with project," just like in Vegas. I did this, and it copied ALL the media in the project, and it copied all the PNG files that are part of the theme, but the one thing it DIDN'T copy is the XML file!! Phooey. If it would just copy the XML file, as modified by the existing project, then we could have "design by example."

A full-fledged theme editor would be nice, but I can live without that. However, being forced to get this "techie" just to get basic defaults to "stick" from one project to the next seems unnecessarily awkward.