Great hack.. Only thing I see that should be changed is the placement of it in your page. Someone posted above that they thought avatars might be registering as visits and that his visits were going up 5 times more than they should be. What happens is you put the counter in your footer and then your really just registering clicks and not how many visits to the home page. Your footer shows everywhere so every time a page is loading it is counted as a visit. If you put it in your forumhome template It will only register your main page.
Example:
Welcome to our newest member, <a href="member.php?s=$session[sessionhash]&action=getinfo&userid=$newuserid"><b>$newusername </b></a><br>
There has been <b>$mycounter</b> visits to this page since July 16th, 2001
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The time now is $timenow.<br>
Thanks for the hack I'm using it now.