Wolverine:
Thanks, the problem turned out to be my new host (I tried a different hosting company for this one): they normally run CRON jobs and change all the file ownerships back to me (rather than 99)so they can do a file count.  Well, the CRON job went rogue on my domain and changed a bunch of my ownerships to random junk (really fun), and I just couldn't figure out why this bridge that had been working for forever didn't want to function right.  So, not the bridge, but the new host.  Sorry for the false alarm, but thanks for the reply.

Couldn't sleep, so I got back up and obviously it helped to have "fresh eyes", to some degree.  Now, I have the "click to patch", but I have a permission problem.  So, now that I have the patched 1.0.12 Joomla index that I can simply FTP and overwrite, can I get the patched files (it's two, right?) posted for SMF?
Appreciate it, guys.

As Always,
Don

PSL Going to be for real this time 

Well, I was off and running on my new site (I have SMF installed on three other sites), and was working on integrating SMF as usual, when I noticed something strange during the install.  At the point where I should have been able to select for it to patch the files, both of the "click to patch" buttons were not in that component screen.  Undeterred (and up far too many hours working on the site), I forged on and downloaded the patched index for Joomla from the thread here, and applied it and got this error:


Sigh.  So, I just re-uploaded my index, which fixed that problem, but of course, this doesn't fix my SMF problem.  Considering it's 5am, and I've been working on all seven of my sites tonight sorting stuff out, I'm inclined to go to bed and check back tomorrow.

So, anyone got any ideas?

Thanks,
Don