ok, i have to start with an apology... i know how it can be answering questions that have already been answered on a forum, and dealing with newbies...
I would definately have used the search function, except that it doesnt work... so here goes.

first of all, i knew about litestep a while ago when a few friends of mine were using it. i never tried it because for them it seemed to be unstable and resource-hogging. I was browsing around the techtv/screensavers website and noticed it was a recent "download of the day" and decided to give it a shot. so far i love it, and havent had too many problems.

next, i have a straightforward question - it seems that for some reason .jpg wallpapers are not displaying at all. i can get .bmp wallpapers to work normally, but whenever i opean the display settings and select a .jpg wallpaper and hit "apply" nothing happens, it stays on whatever paper is currently up. I am using the "modern" theme right now authored by "BigLSDaddy", if that makes any diff.

ok, now for direction... you see, i have been using windows and only windows for all 21 years of my life, never delved into the unix/linux world. I tend to think i know my way around windows pretty damn well, but that doesnt say all that much in the development world. I had no problem downloading LS and installing it, but browsing the board, and varoius other FAQ/info sources, it seems that it jumps from "this is what litestep is and how to download it" to
"this is how to install this module and that module and what to do if this line of code doesnt work"... for instance i visited http://www.residualvisuals.com/ and realized that [from what i gather] those are geared to people making their own themes... and i am definately not ready to do that yet.
So what im looking for is some reading material that can bridge the gap between how to download and install versus how to fix a module... hell it took me a few minutes to really grasp what a module even was... so i can be dense sometimes, go easy on me...

THANK YOU for ANY help you can lend, and for putting up with a n00b! hehe.

About your wallpaper problem, I really don't know what could be wrong. Try out another theme and see if it works, so we'll know if it's a theme problem.

Check out http://o-t-s.sourceforge.net/ for info about the Open Theme Standard v2 (OTS2) and its structure. The docs in your litestep\modules\docs directory are also a great resource.

The JPEG to BMP conversion for wallpapers is actually a screwed up processes that was part of the explorer shell for a long time. In XP SP1 you can set JPEG wallpapers again and life is good. Until then you have to open the image in IE and set it as the wallpaper from there, then IE converts it for you.