Would be nice to have hot links on the top above the first catagory to jump to various catagories instead of scrolling down to your interest areas.
This would be really handy for us with lots of forums to scroll past.

Can't you use the favorite forums feature to only see the forums you want in combination with the collapse/expand categories option?

I can but most of my users aren't computer savvy folks.

There was a way to do so by changing the url 'Cat=0' to the actual cat number this will display only the category of forums. but when I set this up and had links and all the forum search didn't work if there was something other than '0'

example:

https://www.ubbdev.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?Cat=2

Using the Cat variable restricts the viewing to that category everywhere (search, favorites etc...) so it's really meant to limit viewing.

Ok, inserting anchors shouldn't be a problem. You just have to change the ubbthreads.tmpl (add an anchor in the category loop) and the navigation templates to generate a link to every category.