It took me a long time to get around to but I finally re-did the design and scheme on my forums, I would very much be pleased if a few of you could check it out and tell me if its good or if it just plain sucks like before. :)

two words: bmp image...

Oh yeah man, you need to do something about that BMP image. It's nearly 650KB! It looks like you made it with Photoshop and if that's the case then simply save it as a JPG (file->save a copy...). If you only have the BMP file, then open it up in windows Paint and File->save as JPG, GIF, or PNG (you'll have to do some experimentation since Pbrush will most likely lose a lot of the quality when you save it as a non-BMP).

With respect to your forums, they look fine to me. I would recommend consolidating the forums into 1 or 2 forums at max unless you're anticipating tons of posts ;). Additionally, I don't think registering should be mandatory but I'm not sure if you have any control over that.