Can anyone point me at an example of a Wordpress plugin offering forums as traditionally understood by the word - ie much like this forum in structure and with bells and whistles and coloured beads to please the simple...

The two most popular are like SimplePress and bbPress.

At the moment SimplePress might be the more advanced of the two as it's been around longer. The advantage of bbPress is it's part of the Press family of software run by the same people bringing us WordPress and BuddyPress. You would think in time that bbPress will be the de facto forum plugin.

Check the two sites. They both use their own software to run their forums so you have live demos of each. I would probably go with bbPress because of the connection to the other Press applications, but I can't tell you it's the best forum software now.

I don't think either has all the bells and whistles of vBulletin, which is what's used here, though both are going to be easier to work with than vBulletin in my opinion.

Thank you.

One more I forgot to mention is Vanilla. It's another popular forum that works with WordPress.