Has anyone here sent in files to lightning source. Any advice? I looked at their file creation sheet, and am a little unclear. For example, the sheet makes it look like they need PDF files from acrobat. If I only have INdesign, but not acrobat, can I still submit my file?

Export the InDesign file as a .pdf. InDesign and Acrobat are both Adobe products so it will work anyway. Besides any .pdf file is the same no matter what it came from. Acrobat is just the reader/distiller.

I'm wading through this stuff at the moment. Per my understanding, you have to use Acrobat's distiller to get the right PDF format tag in the final product or LSI will bounce your file back. But any other way of producing PDF files usually has an export to EPS method, so you should be able to take that output and run it through distiller to get the final PDF with the right embedded declarations.

Added bonus, you don't have to go through hell trying to get your images into the right color space.

If you go google for "PDF/X-1a:2001" there's a fair amount of discussion.