Support Forum

yes - it could well be a plugin. It looked more like the theme based on where it was in the generated html of the page but a plugin could do it.

You have to be careful here when you say it still does not work with all plugins deactivated. The fact that the jQuery being loaded was incompatible with the latest WordPress and up to date plugins does not, necessarily, mean that there are no other issues preventing things from working as they should. The wrong jQuery can disguise other issues that do not become apparent until the first issue is sorted out.

So the important first step is still to find the offending plugin. This is actually quite easy.

if you load the forum - any page - and then view source from your browser menu - and search for 'jQuery' you will very quickly see - quite near the top - where it is is being loaded - probably called jQuery.min.js or somthing like that. If you look at that url you will see the reference to googleapis.com quite clearly.

Now if you deactivate plugins one at a time and then RELOAD the forum page and look at the source again - if it is still being loaded from google then the deactivated plugin was not the cause. Work through them one at a time. it really is quite a quick and simple task unless you have a large number if plugins active!

And it IS worth the effort because it is not just SP that can be tripped up by this. Any plugin that relies on the correct libraries being loaded can fail. The good news is that the WP dev team are currebtly looking at this problem to see if they can find a way to stop it happening.

Any my immediate response to that is still - the theme is the problem. Is it a free theme? Can I download it from somewhere?

Sadly they are often the worst culprits in our experience.
Feel free to zip it up and email me a copy so I can look at it.

support at simple-press dot com

They were quite right, it is not the theme.
At least it is not the theme mis-loading jQuery