I swear I searched first. on with the show:
I have mplayer installed and it was running along just fine. Then i installed a new skin. Went to the skin chooser and now, no matter what skin i pick, i can only see like 1\4 of it. Any skin, doesnt matter. I have uninstalled mplayer, along with all skins, fonts, etc and basically any folder with mplayer in it hoping its just some currupted config or something. Reinstalled everything EXCEPT the skin i installed before screwing it up. Still messed up. Any ideas on what might be wrong? I dont get any errors when i run mplayer or gmplayer. Movies run fine, just cant see the controls.

Im installing this stuff with urpmi on mandrake 10.1 as it has all the codecs on PLF.

Hey,
I had the same problem, and now an having a similar problem. Try this: when you open gmplayer, the first thing you do is to right click on the controls and select Skin Browser. Then you select the default (or whatever) and it will (hopefully) work fine. This worked for me when half the controls were missing, but a couple of times later, the skin screwed up. The shape of the skin is right still, and the controls are in the right place, so it technically works, but the images to show what controls are what are all screwed up.
If this works the same way it did for me, this will be a temporary solution, and I find it better than not having all the controls, but it's still not perfect.
Well I hope this can start you to a solution,

Steve