Its worth noting the forums do appear in the groups section of buddypress and you can post to them but they are just not displaying in the backend at all so its hard to see how to configure them or moderate them.
if it’s not a plugin issue viz
Plugins
Deactivate all but bbpress and see if this fixes. if it does, re-enable one at a time to see which is causing the error.
the it is likely to be a a theme issue
Themes
If plugins don’t pinpoint the problem, as a test switch to a default theme such as twentytwelve, and see if this fixes.
Then come back
Thanks for the tips here Robin, unfortunately deactivating the plugins and then trying to install and activate the bbpress plugin once more does not generate any options menu under Settings or any admin menus such as Topics, Forums, Replies that you would usually see here. Any other ideas on this?
did you try the theme as suggested above
Themes
If plugins don’t pinpoint the problem, as a test switch to a default theme such as twentytwelve, and see if this fixes.
Same issue. Deactivating all plugins except bbpress and changing themes does nothing.
I have to actually install a new wordpress to get it to show its admin menus etc.
great – glad you’re fixed
Well its not really a fix, I am currently rebuilding the site from scratch now as I have no idea what caused the issue in the first place.
@allmyhoney if you do find the issue that caused it in the future , post a reply in this topic about it.