Ive been using Litestep for a while now, and have had no problems with it. However, upon introducing a friend to it, he asked what I couldn't answer.

If you make a very minimalist theme, does it have less functions than Windows does, and as such can it run at a faster speed?

Baisically, he wants to use some older Windows machines for certain tasks only, and so doesn't need a vast majority of Windows functions. Is this possible, or do you have to have the standard Windows programs running anyways? Im not to good on how Litestep actually works...

Explorer doesn't run, but everything else is pretty much running normally--you'll need to disable apps and services that normally start up, just like if you used explorer for the shell. All you really 'lose' with LS is the desktop and standard taskbar.

If it is severely old (486, original Pentium), though, you may also want to look into the Windows Black Box variants. BBLean or xoblite are hard to beat for old hardware; but, you don't get the kind of control over the interface that LS gives you.

When designing a theme for speed, too, use scripting whenever possible to do multiple actions. MZScript and LSLua are both significantly faster than !execute, and it is a difference that can be felt on older stuff (like a PII box).

also...depending on the graphics used you can lower the amount of memory consumed by your shell. with explorer you do not have control over this.

Cheers for all the advice.
Does anyone happen to know of any Themes already made which are like this or similar enough to not make modifying them such a headache? Im still learning to make Themes, and im not capable of doing it myself yet unfortunatly.
I'll definetly look further into the Blackbox variants though, cheers Cerbie.

there are a bunch of them and they are labeled normally in the description field. If you change your Theme Browsing to the classic Description mode you will find them quite quickly.