Hey Guys - Im out of town right now so Im kind of limited on what I can do to check things out for you but heres my best stab
t3media - does it happen in any other forum? What happens if you rebuild attachements?
tcb - can you check your GD setting and make sure that its right?
wired - whatever the forums permissions are, the article forum persmissions will be (IOW - yup

)
Flea - doesnt make sense to me. I see no error off hand with that SQL. Do you get the same error running that SQL through phpmyadmin? You can try to change any instance of ga. to geek_articles.
ccplim - Thanks
oceanart:
1- shouldnt matter - you can actuially get rid of the ones that you moved outside of the gas/changes folder. IOW - if you copied the index.htm's from gas/changes to the standard directory - I would delete them (especially in your root directory) though they shouldnt pose any problem. They are there to prevent directory browsing.
2- see above

3- Yes, but I thought that happens automatically?
4- leaving the gas folder chmodded to 0777 shouldnt pose a problem - but then I am no security expert. I am sure someone else here could give you the juice on that.
nJoy