Re: BP widgets in subblogs
The Recent Blog Posts and the Site Wide Activity widgets both have code that restricts them to blog id 1.
The Recent Blog Posts widget lives in the mu-plugins/bp-blogs/bp-blogs-widgets.php file. There are two of those nasty blog id 1 checks at line #8 and line #30. Same thing exists in the mu-plugins/bp-activity/bp-activity-widgets.php file.
If you want ‘News’ to work in the home theme then modify themes/buddypress-home/functions.php on lines #49-#50. I just commented them out.
I’m guessing that the thinking behind this restriction is “Get it to work first, then get it to work everywhere”. Kinda like narrowing the possibilities for problems that are gonna exist anyway, down to something trackable. If you browse the forums here and on wpmu you quickly see that wpmu can be installed in about 97 different ways on 205,478 hosts. Slap on a major component like buddyPress, then let noobs like me loose upon the face of the world who want to play with my toys ‘my way’ and I understand the thinking. 
