alright, I have two vBox lined up in an application layer and i have the
vertical gap of the application layer set to be 0. now, i wanna make the top
vBox to have a shadow over the bottom one. how do i accomplish that? plz help!

<mx:VBox width="100%" height="50" backgroundColor="#FF9900"
dropShadowEnabled="true" borderThickness="0" borderStyle="solid">
</mx:VBox>
<mx:VBox width="100%" height="350" backgroundColor="#FFFFFF"
horizontalScrollPolicy="off" verticalScrollPolicy="on">
</mx:VBox>

Whadda ya mean? You want one VBox to be positioned over the other so they are kinda like cascading?

ligerdave,

remember that the last items added to any container are the will be displayed
over anything before it. The mxml markup for the white vbox is listed last so
it's placed on top. To get the orange vbox to be on top, simply place its
markup after the white vbox...(I think I'm making this sound more confusing
than it really is...)

Take a look at the sample code. It should do what you're looking for.

<mx:VBox width="100%" height="350" backgroundColor="#FFFFFF"
horizontalScrollPolicy="off" verticalScrollPolicy="on">
</mx:VBox>
<mx:VBox width="100%" height="50" backgroundColor="#FF9900"
dropShadowEnabled="true" borderThickness="0" borderStyle="solid">
</mx:VBox>

You could also use the black Glow filter to simulate a shadow, like MacOS X
windows. I do this on my project and it works perfect:

<mx:VBox filters="{[new GlowFilter(0x000000, 0.5, 35.0, 35.0, 0.5)]}"
/>