Here is a patch for tuning left.php to be more style and option friendly...any global variables that you see that are not in the config.inc.php I have obviously added and you need to to the same if you want to use this left.php... The easiest and must exciting change is the addition of a title attribute to the table links (so that the table name pops up when you fly over the table if you are using even a halfway decent browser)...helpful for long table names.
If anyone is interested in seeing it all in action, or wants to get some ideas about what I came up with, check out
http://65.5.154.16/phpMyAdmin/
There is no real data on the site, so just be polite and view only...
p.s. I patched the rc4 version
Enjoy!
Dan