Stephen...on your keyboard, just to the right of the 'm'.....bottom row, there are punctuation marks.....helps to use them...
ShellON.exe is the best shell loader/handler around, particularly for NT-based Windows....NT, 2000, XP....as their shells are initiated via registry settings.
ShellON does all that for you....painlessly.
As for distributing/setting up themes without including Litestep.exe.....yes you can, most are done that way....but often you will strike compatability issues with older/newer versions and 3rd-party modules, so I always distribute a full, genuine, self-contained shell, not a 'theme' at all.
OTS is a standard by which you 'should' be able to painlessly add new themes without fear of dramas, and is aimed specifically for those 'new' to LiteSTEP.
I'm in the process at the moment of converting all of mine to OTS, as individual themes, without the exe's, etc, they will be a fair bit smaller...and with the newer Litestep releases handling Png's as well as Bmp's, converting the graphics will shrink things more....
So....your main need is to get ShellON....
http://delusional.psionstyle.co.uk