Wouldn't that take longer? I mean you might have 10 or 100 forums, yet have thousands of members. It already takes roughly 1 second to load, surely checking all those member files would take things through the roof?
I'm no good with PHP, but I'm trying to add some 'error' control so if files are missing then it will ignore them. That's a start, we need somebody more skilled on this.
Perl/CGI ver would be even better =).