well since explorer is needed for all these fucntions... i tried out litestep over explorer. and it works like a charm.
Its better to run explorer then litestep rather than running litestep and then explorer as your file manager.

I added these lines to my personal.rc:



and also modified the default hotkeys defined in the installer so that they wont conflict with those of windows. e.g WIN E for explorer and WIN R for RUN....

finally i added LiteStep to my startup entires through regedit.

A lot of problems now are solved. Icons sure work without any problem. I noticed the whole thing to tun a little faster. Also most of the flickering is now gone. donno if its because of this.

All said and done, i am pretty satisfied with what i have now. The combo runs pretty fine and teh memory requirements are the same as before. (file manager+shell)

I did some more changes but i dont know if they were needed. I think LiteStep should be the first program to run after explorer if all systray items are to be loaded.

overall... problem solved for the time being. :)