A program which replaces Explorer as the shell under Win9x, NT and W2K. DarkStep is essentially clone of another shell replacement, LiteStep, having been designed by a member of the Lightstep design team to address some of its shortcomings. DarkStep was conceived as a themer's shell because while LiteStep offered a lot of customizability, the user had to know quite a bit about the internal workings of LiteStep in order to change a theme or to get all the customizability of LiteStep working. DarkStep, on the other hand, aims at providing the same sort of customizability as LiteStep while also providing ease of use so that a user will be able to switch themes on the fly without having to actually get down and dirty with config files.