Grant, If your solution works for you on your site, by all means, use it! :) My response to your patch was simply that it wouldn't be a wise one to implement back into core Drupal. That said, I do think that more themeability of form elements is needed and is actually something that we're working on! Have you seen the recent node creation redesign threads (http://drupal.org/node/15506 and http://drupal.org/node/14886)? Hopefully the issue that you're running into will be addressed through the continuing work on improving both the default node creation interface as well as the themeability of forms. Chris