Hi Everyone,
I played around with this a little and here's what I got.
The problem I see is that without the tab bg the icons don't show. This is what I've tried.
** bg image in discussion is "hh_fw_tab_bg_fill.png"
I tried making the tab bg image transparent (didn't work, came out black but icons did show) I also tried making the bg image white and black thinking it might be working as a mask for the icons. (No go) I also tried commenting out reference to the image in the xml file but TF didn't reload. I didn't try removing lines altogether.
I ended up changing the tap bg image size to 100px Wide x 1px Height. This got rid of the bg bar but left a gap because the "hh_fw_background.png" wasn't high enough. 240 x 286. I changed the image size to 240 x 305. I added 37 to the height to make up for the missing 37 from the tab bg image.
After doing this I still had a gap and had to change the image size in the home settings xml file.
Property name="IDTABWG_WIDGET_RECT" id="0" value="0,0,240,
280, 0,0,320,230
I changed the 280 value. It was 230. In case you don't know about the values this is how it works. There are two sets of values for the bg image. The first set of 4 numbers refers to Portrait mode. The second set of numbers is for Landscape mode. I didn't mess with the landscape because I only use it for videos.
I did see a theme posted somewhere that didn't use the bg bar.
There is one other thing I tried that did work. I changed the size of the bg bar to 240 wide. I then took a the home background and extended it to 306 in height. I copied the bottom 38px and used it as a fill for the tab bar. You couldn't see the bar except when scrolling (because the screen darkens)
I'll try a couple other things tomorrow.
WP