The most common problem in this area is that a person will have spent a few minutes writing his/her /.gtkeyboardrc file to make the program look the way he/she wants it to, they start the application up, and the layout is totally different. What gives? Usually this is due to a /.gtkeyboard-layout file which the program is reading and using as your layout, ignoring your configuration file settings. If you'd rather use your configuration file to specify layout, use the IGNORE_LAYOUT_FILE option in your .gtkeyboardrc to tell the program to ignore the layout file. Restart the program, and everything should be peachy.
To customize the program's looks, your first stop is the options section of the manual to see what's available. Then, check out the layout section to see what you can do in the way of showing/hiding different elements of the screen layout.
Other than that, if you've gotten GTKeyboard to a layout that you
like, use the ``Save Layout Settings'' option in the
Options
Looks menu to save it all to a file,
/.gtkeyboard-layout. Please note though that this may cause the
first problem in this section if you're not paying attention. :)