First off, thanks for putting this together, very helpful, insightful, and inspiring for us drupal noobs! 
I know through the posts in this forum that you want us to learn for ourselves how to use all of the modules, so I was wondering if you could please describe at a high-level the steps you took to make your forum look as clean and professional as you have?
I've gathered that some of the fields displayed are from the advanced profile module, just curious how you created such nicely defined containers/wrappers for each forum entry, and the separate containers for user info and the post? Are these all CSS changes, or have you done additional manipulation of some of the modules? I have a ton of modules now on my site, but some I have been unable to figure out how to leverage 
I have a vbdrupal site that just doesn't seem to be working as I had hoped, and your site here has inspired me to go with an all-Drupal site, seeing that a great forum is possible.
Any additional guidance is greatly appreciated, thanks again!
Thanks for the feedback Michelle, after some digging it turned out I wasn't actually seeing the advanced forum yet (my code was off). This post described exactly what I was doing wrong, problem solved, thanks! http://drupal.org/node/300713
Love the new Alpha12 release Michelle, you've headed up not only an excellent but BADLY needed module for Drupal. I'm running it in production and the comments I've been getting on the forum are "very smooth" and "clean".
With the work you've done on "Advanced Forums" it's made it possible to use Drupal Forums instead of messing with all the hassle of hacking another forum script to work with Drupal. The next Module I'm waiting for is ACL for restricted and hidden forums.
Just letting you know your efforts are greatly appreciated 
I really needed that today. Hasn't been a good day and this made it a lot better. 
BTW, I haven't tried it but I've heard people say that Taxonomy Access Control works good for forum access and I think that might have a D6 version.
Michelle
Michelle, I really like what you did with this site.
I may have seen the site first when I looked at sites posted at Drupal and now found it again looking through the Drupal forum modules. Just started a week ago with Drupal and am SLOWLY figuring it out.
Where is your "professional" site?
Do you offer design services?
http://couleeregiononline.com/neighbors/michelle
That's also a very nice site.
It sounds like you're quite busy, but if you have a few hours to do some paid work, please contact me.
Christine
You can find more info here: http://shellmultimedia.com/about
I'm fairly booked up but can fit small things in here and there, especially anything related to my modules.
BTW, this demo forum isn't the best place for such questions. I only look on here now and then to delete spam.
Michelle
This site is a demo site for the Advanced Forum module. It only looks like the APK stuff because I used similar code for both.
Michelle