BuddyPress.org

then your best bet is to load the parent and new default themes and tweak the default to suit your needs. But I admit to reading your older posts and either you’re faking it well by pasting in a bunch of code to make it look you you know a thing or two about programming, or you know more than you’re leading us to believe. Either way, I’m sure this makes sense to even a non-programmer like yourself:

Retrieve the name of the highest priority template file that exists.

Searches in the STYLESHEETPATH before TEMPLATEPATH so that themes which inherit from a parent theme can just overload one file.

from the Description of locate_template()