my experience:

Not wanting to screw around with anything internal anymore,
I expect to be able to load and go.
I don't want to go under the hood to make the car go.
I just want to turn the key and go somewhere. Thats why I drive my car, not because of who it was, or wasn't, made by.

For whatever reason, Litestep blows chunks after only a few uses in my corporate NT environment. It was a serious waste of time. Is it not ready for primetime? I may have missed that part when I was flipping through these pages.

But, your website and graphics are awesome. e-me when litestep is crash free...

Here is what I tried:
LiteStep_Installer_2.7.2.exe on NT4SP6 part of a centrally managed network. I used the "multiple-user-workstation" option.

Keep it up!

it's been ready for prime time for quite some years.

however, as was mentioned many places, if you're not willing to tinker with it, then no, it's not for you. we choose to accept the fact that not all themes will work right the first time, and those that do, we'll need to modify anyways to make them more useful for our own purposes. because in the end, we have a far superior working (and play) evnironment than we would if we were still running the explorer shell, in regards to stability and function. not even to MENTION that LS themes look a hell of a lot better than explorer EVER could. :P

OTS2 should take care of most of your "out of the box" problem for themes as soon as there are more out ( 3 out that i know of minibar, howzit pro, and the default OTS2 theme) it provides auto theme install. LS is more stable than explorer unless a themer/user miss configured something. you used an installer which means that litestep should be setup properly.

if you could give us more details as to what happened we can probable help you.

I recall that once installed (using all the defaults), which worked very well, i would start using the desktop objects and after a few switches between apps -- current windows, windows would stop coming back up and there would be long delays. it would become unpredictable and I would have to kill it.

My curiosity is still high, and i wish i knew more about how it all works so I could fix it myself. the effort from those of you that contribute to the community development of this kind of hard software is appreciated so much.

You're likely going to have to tinker with it...very few people use WinNT4 now, and so many modules are no longer tested under it. On top of that, some features simply require Win2k/XP, and may cause as much trouble in NT4 as they do in 95, 98 and ME.

one of the modules being used by the theme was probably causing a memory leak. the only way to figure out which one is to comment each out one at a time and test it out. or, if it's an old theme, try using newer versions of the modules.