Need a super-stripped down menu

[stonetide]

I'm not sure if this actually falls under the purview of themes.

I picked up a Sansa Clip+ for my autistic nephew, and I'd like to get it set up so that the only option is Music, and the options under Music are more limited (no extra podcast/audiobook/rating options). By default, the home options are Music, slotRadio, Radio, Voice, Settings. He's pretty young and for this to be useful for him, right now, there needs to be a lot fewer places to get lost. =/ Is this something I can do with themes?

I tried using some of the ones that come with Rockbox, but pretty much all of them seemed to make things MORE complicated, not less (even ones like "minimalist").

[gbl08ma]

Rockbox is an alternative firmware which is made to be more configurable (have more options) than the original firmware music players come with. So yes, Rockbox adds a layer of complexity to almost everything.

Since Rockbox menus are not customizable, not even with themes (they only change the looks, they don't add or remove functions or menu items), you would have a lot of work trying to simplify things. You'd need to compile Rockbox from source and remove the features you need - it can be done, but it's not trivial specially for people who never touched source code before.

What themes can do for you is simplifying the WPS (while-playing screen, the "Now Playing" screen), so that it only shows the very relevant information (e.g. the title of the song and it's artist, the volume level and the battery charge). Themes can also change the user interface in order to change the fonts used, make the font size bigger, change the icons (or remove them), the colors, and the position of things in the screen.
Some of these things you can configure on the player itself, others you'll need to change on existing themes or create a new one from scratch.

You can also delete all the plugins, that will remove many of the "places" to get lost. The plugins are things like games, utilities (text editor, calculator) and demos (which are of little usage, except perhaps PictureFlow). All the plugins come installed with Rockbox, you can't download additional ones - but you can delete the existing ones.

Tell us if you need any more help, for example, removing plugins or changing themes.

[saratoga]

I think the best you can do without changing code would be to set the start up screen to the file browser.  That wouldn't keep you from seeing the front menu if you hit the right buttons to get to it, but it would make it harder to get to. 

[Llorean]

Just as a note, even were the menus configurable one option that would be kept as 'impossible to remove' would be the one that resets the configuration to ensure that nobody could accidentally make their player unusable while traveling. If you really want it minimalist you're going to need to learn a little programming, probably.