I don't know how it got there - or how to get rid of it.

I have the "active topics" panel always open on every page.?

have a link to your site?

It sounds like you have an active topics island enabled in your portal settings.

It was the "active posts" drop down info from the nav bar.
I had munged my tables code in the "Default header" / "HTML Includes" box when I added a board logo. I found some help on how to do that correctly in another thread and am all set on THIS issue.

This board is still in beta - I'm using 7.1b for the test board.
I will be putting up an instance of 7.1 once I've got the design worked through.