Aqua, gel, glass, crystal background / border creator

Hey, I'm trying to create some new backgrounds from the menu and title bars on my site. Good examples of what I want to do are:

http://is82.com/ (the black horizontal link bar)
http://yellowicon.com/stockicon/ (as above)
http://vista-buttons.com/ (turquoise link bar)

I don't want to spend any money on it, so the best i've found so far is http://www.glassybuttons.com/glassy.php where i can change height of the graphic and any custom hex colour, though i have little control over the blending of colours and the amount of highlighting other than stretching and editing in photoshop. The free prog from the vista-buttons site above is also ok, but it doesn't allow any custom colours so it's a bit useless for me. All other progs i've tried are either not customisable enough or aren't free.

Also, creating from scratch in photoshop elements 2 takes so long and although i have access to full photoshop 7, unless theres a really quick plugin to do the kinda stuff above then i wouldn't wanna bother with it.

So, anyoe know any decent free aqua / glass effect border creating progs? Thanks.

Oh, my site's at http://www.inaudible.co.uk/crimea/ with my current attempts so far visible.

Does not take that long in Photoshop. And you can always create an action if you needed the process to expedite the process.

are there any decent guides for doing it in photoshop? only ones i can find go a bit like this:

http://www.axialis.com/tutorials/tutorial-misc003.html

and almost all are based around spheres. and it generally takes me hours to do anything in photoshop, especially if it's not just following a guide step by step :(

You know, creating this is pretty cheap actually. What you to is draw a rectangle in your favorite color and then draw another rectangle over it (in a new layer - half of the height of the first one) with a gradient from white to transparent. Then you move the gradient down so it won’t fade out entirely but it will be cut off a little. Then you decrease opacity of that rectangle and done you are.
Of course you can add more details like in your second example with the borders and stuff but the basic effect is very simple and done as above.