Utilities: Litestep+xLabel+xTray. What Dev means is that Austerity is not modification-friendly. The code that makes it up is strange and fragile, and some of the (old) modules it uses are buggy.

Taskbar: how is it being hidden, and what taskbar?

Start downloading more themes from here. Austerity, when it was new, barely stretched any of the capabilities LS and its modules had at the time.

Oh, and: http://wiki.litestep.com/Themes:Development