I too had to use virtual include to get it to work
can you guys check out mine
http://www.gixxer.com/main.shtml I had to massage the script a bit to modify how the output looked
does my page load slow?
also is there a way to speed up the script? Can it tie into the UBB cache?
does using the "limit characters" cause the script to run slower than just pulling in the whole topic?