I have found a program online that will take a collection of images and pack them all onto a single sprite sheet and spit out a corresponding text file with position and names. This is significant because now i can parse the text file for source rectangle information and only ever have to load a few textures for the entire game without getting bogged down in the math of extracting specific sprites. It's a really elegant solution and I can see myself using it again on a much bigger project and having it save loads of time on loading screens.
on top of this i've written up a realy basic input text box for xna. This is more or less accomplished by making a conversion for every possible key to an ascii character.
