but he wants the statistics appear just like in statistics page. (with the blue percentage bars)
now, how can we do?
Look at the smf_stats table and see what information you can extrapolate from it

Now, the issue I have here, is that I am under the understanding that SSI will allow my folks to log in, and bop from board to board to board (I also have the cookies set the same for each board). How do I do so, with SSI, because right now, even with the shared tables and cookies, you still have to log in fresh for each board...and that just won't do!
Are you using ssi_login() to create the form? If not, try that. It should log you in and direct you to the forum (unless you get redirected to the currently viewed page). Here's an example:
www.roundcubeforum.net/portal/index.php..., but you may need to alter the server path. I am only just beginning to look at this myself, and I've read that the above code should go at the top of your file, but I've placed under my doctype decloration, and this seems to work.
This prevents sessions from being used on your page. So if you have any information for user-login and such, you won't be able to retreive it

You should include before any html output to the browser just so that you can have access to the sessions

Is there any way to show the Avatar for the user posting using SSI instead of displaying just the username?
It should be stored in: $context['user']['avatar']['href'] or $context['user']['avatar']['img']

I want to produce the links to the most recent topics from a specific forum.
NOTE: The following is based off of 1.1RC2, not 1.0.5. Sorry 
Tough to do... especially if you have lots of boards. So I'll take some time with this one.
-- First: Find out the ID of the board you want to view (look at the link, it should be something like index.php?board=X.X). For the rest of the boards, we're going to exclude them. So make sure you know the highest board ID (use the admin panel if you want, or look at the mySQL table)
Now, just call your function like so:
<?php
$exclude = array('1','2','3','4','5','7','8','9','10');
$topics = ssi_recentTopics(10, $exclude, 'array');
So what this does is we exclude all boards except for board ID 6. It also pulls the 10 most recent topics. And finally, it returns the information in an array, rather than just displaying it.
So how you deal with it when it's returned is up to you. I would guess you'd want something like:
<?php
$exclude = array('1','2','3','4','5','7','8','9','10');
$topics = ssi_recentTopics(10, $exclude, 'array');
foreach($topics as $topic)
echo $topic['link'], '<br />';
?>
That will output a link on each line with just the subject. It will show all 10 recent topics.
Now, something I'd like to see added, is the "View unread replies to subscribed topics" function. I'm lookin to get it working now, but don't know what to query, since I don't know how subscriptions are handled. Perhaps [Unknown] can help?