I bit the bullet and upgraded our forum to 3.0.5 tonight. The vB upgrade script nicely wiped out all the articles templates.
This is because they are installed as Master templates, and the upgrade script wipes and replaces all the master templates. Therefore i had to restore the templates from the backup I took (you do all backup before upgrading don't you

).
Alternatively, I believe the articles install script has the option to install the templates only. Now that the templates are restored it seems to be functioning okay.