Hi Nick,

The feature instance settings and pretty much all of the admin areas where we have tabs are using the YUI tabs. Basically the YUI css is included in the page above the site css, so that you can override it with site css as needed. Now figuring out what you need to override can be tricky becuase the YUI javascript puts new css classes on elements that you can't see just by viewing the source of the rendered page. There are ways of inspecting the page after it loads and all the javascript has run with Firebug and other browser plugins to see what css classes are assigned on elements. Once you see the css classes then you can make educated guesses about which ones to use to override and/or you can download the actual yui css file and study it to figure out what needs to be overridden. That would be my general strategy. In this case you might be lucky because there is a tutorial on skinning the YUI tabs here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/tabview/skinning.html

My best guess looking at the article is you could override the background color with a selector like this:

.yui-skin-sam .yui-navset .yui-content {
background:#edf5ff; /* content background color */
}

I have not tried it though.

Best,

Joe