I'm totally new to this sort of thing and though the install went great with my litmited knowhow I'm not sure how to change the graphics so it looks like "my page" instead of Generic Xoops

Can you show me an example or the page you want to change?

There's alot of graphics softwares you can use it for free for lifetime. Not the trial one.

Take this page for example. At the top panel. I know how to turn off the banner, but how would I change the background and replace the XOOPS logo?

You can change the background color in the style.css

and

You can change the logo by change the image link in the theme.html

or

You replace the logo image in the "themes/default/logo.gif" directory.

Here are a couple places you can get documentation on how to edit your themes:

Xoops For Dummies @ Xoops Documentation Site
Xoops Wiki

If you really want to trick your site out, spend some time learning html and CSS. Here's an excellent resource for learning the basics of coding.

W3Schools

Creating XOOPS themes is very similar to coding traditional html/css themes, except you have to include some php code to get things to display correctly.

My best suggestion would be for you to open /themes/default/theme.html and /themes/default/style.css in a text editor and study the code. Compare it to what you find at W3Schools. If you pick things up relatively quickly, you could be coding your own custom theme in less than a week.

Hope this helps.