Also to get rid of that annoying message, the BP plugin clearly states that you must put the tag “buddypress” in the Tag: section of your theme’s stylesheet, AFTER you have made the suggested changes.
When you activate the template, it figures out which is your current theme. It puts its own theme files (found in the buddypress plugin subdirectory themes/bp-default) into your theme’s directory.
I downloaded the /themes/bp-default files to my hard drive, made the changes there, and then uploaded the files and folders in that directory to my theme, replacing what the BP Template plugin already placed there and it’s working fine and dandy.