Well, having checked and rechecked everything, it turns out it was that the secret in wp-admin/options.php was different than the secret in the wp integration settings in bbpress.
I had checked these before and they were identical, but at the time I might have been dealing with a path issue. Then when the path issue was resolved I never went back to ensure they were still the same.
My suggestion to everyone is to check everything even if you KNOW you check them before.
Those solutions did’t work.
I just upgraded wordpress to 2.5.1 and still no luck.
update: Everything in the cookie (when looking at it in firefox) seems identical except the content section and the expire time.
The content section has the user name, but the two numbers after it are different.
