Customizing Theme

Hello - I'm brand new to Gallery and am setting up version 3 for a site that I'm working on. I'm trying to incorporate it into the current site's look and feel. I copied one of the themes that was there, then set the gallery to use the new theme. I customized and customized until I got it looking the way I wanted. Very happy. However, then I went into the Admin side, and when editing albums and images, I'm suddenly looking at a garbled mess because it's trying to use the same layout that my site is. I was under the understanding that the two were separate, which is why you could choose a different theme for the admin panel.

Any thoughts? I was in the process of running my own queries against the DB to get what I needed into my existing templates. I have everything working except the pagination (previous and next images). So if this is the best way to go, perhaps someone might have some thoughts on how to accomplish that.

By the way, in trying to find a gallery that was going to offer the features I wanted (simple and the ability to do mass uploads), I also compared Gallery3 to Gallery2 and to Coppermine. To me, Gallery 3 wins hands down!

Thanks!
Todd