Additonal update:
Scrap notes #1 and 7 from my second message - they were unrelated and now fixed.
If I manually set the tid column in both the forum and term_node tables I can get the posts to successfully display. If I set it in only term_node and not in forum, it says "this forum topic has moved". In both cases tid was initially set to 0. It would seem that the 38 from the node/add URL is not being passed/accepted by anything.
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Tony Yarusso
http://tonyyarusso.com/