Bah, don't listen to them - just take it slowly.
I jumped in at the deep end and disguarded whole chunks of code. Result: EQ crashed. So, I started again, this time just tweaking one thing at a time. If it crashed, I know that type of line shouldn't be messed with in that way. Within an hour I had my first box, tweaked from an existing mod.
If in doubt, don't delete it, just make it too small to see )
)