By ‘new forum’ can I assume you mean a new, individual forum in an existing SP install? Although I am unsure what you mean by ‘basically empty’.

When you arrive at the 404 page is the url to this new forum what you would expect? Is the forum portion of the url correctly derived?

do you have a link??  might be worth quick visit to forum – integration – page and permalink and give the forum permalink a quick upgrade…

no caching plugin, right?  or at least its ignoring the forum page?

I’ve learned about caching plugins and unintalled them quite a while ago. 

The good news is the forum is not “live” to my group and I have been practicing to get ready.  I have uninstalled and re-installed and am still getting the same behavior:

– When I click on the add new topic button or the link http://ctsurrogate.org/forum/questions-and-discussion&new=topic

or the title of the forum http://ctsurrogate.org/forum/questions-and-discussion I get ERROR 404 – PAGE NOT FOUND

I created a temporary account ctsurrogate.org. Please Login Username: tempadmin  Password: tempadmin

try it now…  you had wp set at default permalinks… so /forum is not valid…  it would be ?page_id=xx or something…

I just turned on custom permalinks and all is well…

Thank you so much.  I’ll have to do some research to better understand what you did.

good sourc:  http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

just made your site use permalinks so /forum would work for the forum…  sp works fine with default permalinks too, but then the address to forum would not be /forum, but would /?page_id=xxx where xxx is the id of the wp page the forum is set to display on…