Gizmo, thank you for the help. Since I didn't have a clue what was wrong, you pointed me in the right direction.
I doublechecked my hosts settings and found that the actual path had been CHANGED to:
/home/users/web/b553/ipg.campinnforumcom
Why in the world would my host switch this without any notification? I wonder if this is a common thing to happen...?
Anyways, once I punched in the new paths everything started working again.
Another thing I don't understand is why my forum seemed to 'gradually break' over the course of 3 days. Everything is working now that I've got the paths sorted, but I'll list some of the symptoms here in case they help someone else...
First little things started to quit working - like user's couldn't post to the photo gallery. Then user's couldn't post new avatars. Then, "who's online" froze along with all other forum stats. Then, half of the control panel quit updating - nothing I changed would stick - while the other half of the control panel continued to respond normally. It seemed to be random - which areas of the control panel were affected. Then, outside links to the forum began breaking - depending on how complete the text of the link was. Last of all, the entire forum shut down, giving a fatal error. The only thing left working was parts of the control panel.
After spending two frustrating nights trying to get it all working, you can bet that my host is going to hear from me!
