CLOSURE! Finally. Omar was awesome enough to help me with the problem via e-mail, so I'll share what I learned with everyone. If anyone has LiteStep crashing randomly with only certain themes, including simplicity, comment out all modules like jugg said. What ended up happening is as follows:

label.dll was causing problems when it loaded because of the cpu meter function. It was as I understand an old NT4.0 prob. Should not have even affected me in the first place since I'm on XP.

Under Omar's suggestion I upgraded to the latest version of said module, opened base.rc and changed CPULabelText: "CPU [cpu]" to CPULabelText: "CPU N/A"... that did the trick and everything worked. For some reason the [cpu] with the brackets was screwing it up. I can enter any other text without the brackets and its fine.

So to keep from rambling as I so often do, thanks to all who helped, I appreciate it alot. Took a week, but we got the situation under control and I can have happy 'Stepping.

Peace out all, I'll probably be seen again :)

DLake