@r-a-y nope removing the leading lash results in the same single render issue. The STYLESHEETPATH seem to be the way to do it for now and this does seem to be a WordPress issue with locate_template() so I’ll take that up over in their neck of the woods. Thx for the help, I was banging my head for over an hour.
@r-a-y it works, you obviously came across this before and it makes sense now that I see it. It really seems a bit off and hackish though, is this an issue with locate_template, buddypress or a “feature”?