This seems to have to do with a bug that I was getting ready to report, but I haven't ascertained that it has not already been reported...

I would lay odds that your new user had a space in their name. SMF doesn't like the spaces (or dashes, etc.), but Joomla does. I had a user create a new account with a space in the name, so the Joomla account got created, but the SMF account didn't. The email went out without domain links in it. Attempting to sync users will fail for the SMF illegal names.

Testing with a valid SMF name, I got the right validation email with complete links.

The account creation page needs to be set up to disallow spaces and other SMF illegal characters if the Joomla account is created first. Maybe there's a tweak to make it reg through SMF first to escape this.

Yeah, I just had another user with the same problem with a very simple login name, so my earlier assumption was a bad one.

I had the forum up before I had the Joomla wrapper, so I think some people might be going in through the forum signup instead of the Joomla signup, so that's where it's falling apart.

Thanks, cowboy, giving it a try.

I noticed in vim that a couple of the lines in that area (like the global declaration) showed up with ^M EOL codes, while most don't. Are those odd carriage returns affecting the script evaluation?