does anyone know of any way to hide your external stylesheet so that no one can go into your coding and find the stylesheet's address to steal css? I've had a theft problem recently... won't describe it here, but I need to know ASAP

no. just like any other webpage source code, external pages are always accessable no matter what preventions you put in place.

Lots of people just do the linking stylesheets way so that it's not inside your source. It fools alot of beginners because they go "huh? what? where is it?", but it's still accessible by almost everybody. :( .