Seems to me that I read the i Frames make google, yahoo etc run away and not want to come back to our forums..

Is that true?

Well, search engines won't "run away" from your site -- but from what I understand it'll index the page, and see the iframes as separate pages, but not necessarily index them properly. What you'd want to do is add your iframe URLs to your sitemap.xml file so G* and Y* can index them separately and properly.

I don't quite like the wording, but basically yes, search engines and users don't like frames

at least without a navigation/sitemap...