ok, so, i tried redoing everything from scratch again. page is up, but still crawling (forums home page loads in full in about 1 second. entrance page loads in 6 or 7).
still getting the "view polls" error, too.
i noticed i couldn't CHMOD my configpal.php this time around. i get an error saying "550 Could not change perms on configpal.php: Bad file descriptor" when i try."
is that attributing to my mess?