Exactly, thats where I was on this thing. Pulling in the text and such worked fine, Getting $r or $a or anything else seems to be the trick. I'm thinking that registerednav.tmpl is coming in before those variables are assigned. So in essence they don't exist yet.
$r {$ubbt_lang['C_ONLINE2']} $a {$ubbt_lang['C_ONLINE4']}
Does exactly as advertised, gives you the text. What I'm after is the total users online to be displayed at the top of the screen, as opposed to being at the bottom. Actually in my case I don't care if it's done in both places.
Thanks for the reply, and effort.