[Jakeman]

everyone that is registered and logged in should be able to access chat.

oh wait. you are running vbportal. i recall some one else had problems with this chat script and vbportal. probably something with global.php. you might try uploading the regular global.php to your forum directory but call it global2.php so it doesn't overwrite or conflict with anything else. then edit the chat scripts to include global2.php instead of global.php. (random idea, might work, might not)

otherwise you might want to ask wajones @ www.phpportals.com about this problem. give him a link to this thread and ask him if he knows what you need to change to get it working with vbportal.