UIS1 to UIS2

I've beat my head against the wall for months trying to convert a ported UIS 1 visual style to UIS 2, including converting the bitmaps to .png, etc.. without success. The standard answer to your question has always been a resounding "No!". Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Now watch, someone will come along and say, "Sure.... it's easy!" But of course, no details will be given either.

I assume you know if you can find the VS, you can port it to UIS2 and then copy all the BMPS from the WB UIS1 to the new ported UIS2 version, and a lot of rework is eliminated.
It's amazing what old Visual Styles you can find on DA.

I was just hoping there was a quicker and easier way. Heavy sigh...........

Well, I have read others who have said essentially what you wrote, re: porting an original VS to UIS2 and then copying all the BMP's to the new UIS2, etc... However, I have never been able to figure out how to do that nor what is actually entailed in the copying over of the BMP images. What I have gotten is mainly generic terms and sparse instructions not amounting to much more than what you wrote. Either people don't care to share the details of such a procedure or they lack communication skills. But whatever the reason, I've not been able to accomplish this very thing myself and would love to be able to do so.

Ok. Lets say you have made several changes with an image editor to a WB skin called Slick. If you are like me, when you edit tga files, you have to save them as bitmaps since Skin studio doesn't recognize any tga files I save with my image editor(Photofiltre) or any others I have tried. SO, what I do is change the style and color of some buttons and maybe some bars, change a font or two and then save the finished skin as a WB which is saved in the Windowblinds Directory under C:\Program Files\Stardock\Object Desktop\Windowblinds\Slick.
Now lets say I couldn't find a way to change the menu bar or menubar items because it is a UIS1 Skin. Here is where I wanted a way to save such a skin as UIS2 instead of UIS1.
Since it doesn't seem to exist, the next thing to do is to find a VS style version of Slick. If I find it, I can port it with Skin Studio to a UIS2 format.
(When you import the msstyle, click the Options button > Parameters tab > select "WindowBlinds Visual Style - optimize for maximum quality" - Thanks to Koasati for that help).
When you port it, change the name to Slick1 or whatever because it is going into the Windowblinds folder where Slick already resides. Then you can copy the BMPs that you have already changed from Slick to Slick1 to save yourself some redoing what you have already done. Don't copy anything that is not an image.
Hope that gives you enough information to to it the hard way. If not, ask and I will try to help.

Ya know.... you have no idea how much I appreciate that little tidbit of information, re: Options, etc. when importing a MSStyle. It resolved many problems I was having and now, finally after so many months and in an instant fixed my "Top Image" magic pink problem.

I'm still not sure how the "copy" of BMPs is done, e.g., if you simply copy/paste and thus overwrite the images in the skin folder? or perhaps you "Import" them in SKS? Yeh, sounds like a dumb question, but for me it is a legitimate one.

Glad I could help, and you are welcome.
When I say copy, yes I mean copy and paste the bitmaps you may have already modified into the new directory. When it asks if you want to replace the older bitmap say yes.
You see, on a lot of skins, I had done a lot of modifying of buttons, toolbars etc and when I found out how to import the skins as UIS2, I didn't want to loose all the work I had already done. That's when I started copying the work I had already done from the original skin folder to the new skin folder I had just ported as UIS2. Some work can be saved that way, but not all.
No such thing as dumb questions when you are trying to learn something.
Have fun.