BuddyPress.org

Thanks a million for the suggestions, JJJ. They set me on the right track to find a solution.

Turns out it was my own damn fault I was porting over an older BP theme to the new framework, which involved some cutting and pasting of old lines in header.php to the new theme. I was trying to be careful to make sure that I didn’t bring over anything that was redundant or incompatible, but it turns out that I left in some references to options.php, which has been replaced by optionsbar.php. So I fixed that, and then wiped out a bunch of plugins that may or may not have been causing conflicts, and now everything is totally copacetic.

Still don’t know exactly what the problem was – I don’t really see off the top of my head how the presence or absence of optionsbar.php would cause problems with bbPress – but in any case it’s now working. Thanks again for your help John.