Some of the earliest EQ2UI mods were graphical reskins that included little or no XML. Particularly, the work by
SaintSinner which I believe is often overlooked because it's in the complete sets download area.
I use a heavily self modified version of SaintSinner's
Nature UI that has never been released to the public (and won't be; SaintSinner's work is really great and my fine-tuning was sheerly for reasons of personal taste).
You don't need to know XML to do this sort of reskinning; just a decent image editor and a DDS format plugin. I recently built a new computer with Windows XP but until then only had Win98SE so know your pain with not having UIBuilder. Actually, since I learned how to work with the EQ2UI XML all in notepad, I rarely use UIBuilder at all even though I have a Windows XP machine now.
Quib