GOT IT!!!!!!
woot woot. all i had to do was put the theme.zip into my 7-zip archive, without extracting, then open the drawable-hdpi folder in com.htc.resources (all of this through 7-zip), and edit the .png's. When i then backed out to my main archive, 7-zip automatically updated the .apk, while keeping it as a .apk so I could flash the theme again. You can see the new themed 3g icon up top. I did this for 1X as well, so when im not in 3g, that's the same thing just for 1X.
woot woot. all i had to do was put the theme.zip into my 7-zip archive, without extracting, then open the drawable-hdpi folder in com.htc.resources (all of this through 7-zip), and edit the .png's. When i then backed out to my main archive, 7-zip automatically updated the .apk, while keeping it as a .apk so I could flash the theme again. You can see the new themed 3g icon up top. I did this for 1X as well, so when im not in 3g, that's the same thing just for 1X.