Last night I found that I chould change the fckeditor skin - that helped with the visibility of the icons. A recent read od the fckeditor forum at the dnn site let me know that fck.css is the place to control fck's stylings - Maybe I can get it to stop screwing around with my html.
This morning I went over Lee Sykes videos on membership and the user profile. Now all I have to do is find a way to display / expose the underlying tables. Maybe xmod or xlist will help me with this, It would be real cool if someone had a view of the user profile....