[John James Jacoby]

The Forums link appears regardless of the forum physically existing or not. Once the BuddyPress forums plugin is turned on, it turns on all of the links also.

Regarding the steps you’ve taken, they’re all correct, so don’t second guess yourself there.

My guess is this is a PHP Memory error. Your host probably has you defaulted to 8MB, and you’re going to need much more than that allocated to run WPMU and XMLRPC.

In your .htaccess files (both WPMU and bbPress) put

php_value memory_limit 32M

You can also alternatively make a php.ini file, put that in your root directory, and inside it put

memory_limit = 32M

If it still doesn’t work, report back.