I don't want all these CSS files

Your styles are all passed in to your template files as the $styles variable. To remove specific stylesheets you need to edit this variable.

This should be done within the template.php file, in a function called _phptemplate_variables (in Drupal 5 - something like that google it) or a preprocess hook in D6. This function is run before any processing of template files.

At this point you can modify your CSS by using a combination of drupal_add_css and drupal_get_css. This allows you to retrieve an array of css files currently registered and also to add new ones. If you need to remove a css file:

create a temporary array containing the current css
unset the array element for the css file you wish to remove
resest the css based upon that array

D5 sample code below:


$new_css = drupal_add_css();
// remove unnecessary CSS styles
unset($new_css['all']['module']['modules/user/user.css']);
// rebuild CSS
$vars['styles'] = drupal_get_css($new_css);


Since you are using Drupal 6, you can do it like this in template.php via the phptemplate_preprocess_page function:

<?php
/**
 * Override or insert PHPTemplate variables into the templates.
 */
function phptemplate_preprocess_page(&$vars) {

  // Unset stylesheets.
  $css = $vars['css'];
    unset($css['all']['module']['modules/node/node.css']);
    unset($css['all']['module']['modules/system/system-menus.css']);
    unset($css['all']['module']['modules/system/system.css']);
    unset($css['all']['module']['modules/system/defaults.css']);
    unset($css['all']['module']['sites/all/modules/cck/theme/content.css']);
    $vars['styles'] = drupal_get_css($css);  
}

You will need to clear the theme registry for this to work -> admin/settings/performance, "Clear cache data".

In Drupal 5 you could use a similar approach using _phptemplate_variables, though I haven't ever needed to do this so for D5 this remains untested.

To add new stylesheets (or simply over ride core stylesheets) you can include them in your themes .info file - http://drupal.org/node/171209.

This should be enough if you want to add your stylesheets to every page, otherwise you can do it via the API - http://drupal.org/node/225868

EDIT: I just wanted to add that unsetting system.css could break a lot of stuff in your drupal site, especially in the admin section and/or forms (think fieldsets, dragable widgets etc), I would think its better to simply over ride it in your .info file and modify it there.