'Sir'? Good grief...
Re LiteSTEP.
Currently, a themeing standard has emerged called 'OTS' which enables quite simple installation and switching of themes which was always the bug-bear of LiteSTEP in the past.
If you grab a Litestep installer for the OTS format you'll have very few problems, if any.
[Being 'strange' I set mine up manually, converting from the traditional method by hand.]
In Win XP, the shell is handled/loaded via registry settings, so is not quite as simple as the one line in the system.ini as was the case in win 9x.
To make life easier there is always ShellON as a shell selector which can be run as shell and sets the reg settings for you, and enabling shell-loss protection [catching crashes] when 'playing' with settings.
XP's Task Manager allows easy access to killing a shell that may be giving problems and then ShellON pops up and gives you the chance to reload it or chose another shell. This is handy for updating the LiteSTEP distribution files without having to boot out of the shell...just kill it, update, and reload.
Head off to Shellfront.org http://www.shellfront.org for more info and appropriate distributions/installers...
