"it sort of worked...but not really" isn't a very good explanation of what went wrong. Also, as has been mentioned before, it's generally a good idea telling us what particular theme you're having problems with. As for installing themes, your approach (i.e. unzipping it to that folder) *should* work I think, but then again I don't normally use LS Installer. Have you made sure the theme is OTS2 compliant? Wincustomize has a lot of ancient LS themes that you shouldn't let anywhere near a modern LiteStep installation.