Ok, I fixed the problem. It appears there was a remnant of a previous hack in the cache directory. Someone, I'm guessing a tech at the web host, removed all permissions from the directory thus causing the two problems I reported above.
The cache directory still contained a bogus web page that was owned by apache which I couldn't delete. So I moved the entire directory out from under the web server, recreated the cache directory with the proper permissions and copied back the ubbthreads files needed in that directory.
