First, the forums are right where they were before and they work just fine.  Just select it from the menu (Help From Others -> Web Forums) and you're there.  The only thing is that the first time you visit it, you'll have to log into the forums, even if you're already logged into Backup Central.  (If you click "automatically log me in on each visit," you won't have to do it again.)

For those of you who are curious as to what happened, it was an incompatibility between a search-engine optimization tool I installed (Magic Seo) and the bridge I was using between Joomla! and PhpBB.  I installed the SEO tool, and things looked fine for several days, and Google was indexing my site MUCH better, and then I found the problem.  I had seen the reason I'm here, but had been ensured by Magic SEO that the problem was just caching or something, and then it came back.  Turns out it only happened if you were logged in and then closed your browser and reopened.  

After several emails back and forth with tech support it became apparent the problem was the two products working together (or not, as the case may be).  If I turned either mod off, the problem went away.  The choices were to give up the new SEO product or the phpbb/Joomla! bridge.  Given the impact of the SEO product, I chose it over the bridge, especially since Google had already started indexing my site using it.

I ended up having to write my own custom PHP code to sync the user databases of Joomla! and phpBB.  Since I don't write PHP, that was quite the chore!  With some help from some friends and Google, I was able to do it.   Now any user in Joomla! will be added to the forums within five minutes.   (I'll figure out some way to have it happen as soon as you register, but this'll do for now.)

Yeah, I know, I need a dev site, and I never should have gone live with such a thing on a prod site.  Already up and running.  Any chance there's some good PHP-savvy folks that could help me troubleshoot this?