I am using Atahualpa 3.4.6 and it works very well and looks great. There are a few odd things about it but I have managed to work around most of them. This is more of an informational question, as the answer is not going to effect the function of my blog.

On the dashboard there are several topics ("Right Now" "Recent Topics", etc.). Four of the topics don't ever seem to be live. "Incoming Links", "Plug Ins", and "Other WordPress News" all have Loading... under them and nothing ever loads. What is the cause of that? I can't seem to find what I am not hooking up here, and I have looked all over the control panel.

Second, a friend of mine and I want to make it so that you don't have to register to read the blog. I think that the blog is readable as long as you click and go there (and I do have the blog visibility turned on). But In General Settings I have checked the box "Anyone can register" which kind of implies that you do have to register. Is there any way to turn off the requirement to register? I can't find any thing like that either. I suspect that you have to register to leave a comment and that is so that spam is not encouraged.

I appreciate your help on this.

You should take a look at the documentation over at wordpress.org - here is a link to the 'general settings' subpanel documentation and from there you should be able to make your way to the dashboard documentation. http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_General_SubPanel

Thanks, I am OK on the registration question. As for the loading problem, I switched to the default theme and the loading problem still was there (some of the topics were normal but the three I spoke of before still showed loading). I conclude that it is a WordPress thing and I will go over there to investigate. Thanks again.