Of all the damned-annoying things!? It occured to me whilst I was turning plugins on and off what the problem actually was:

As I turned plugins off (say, the weather plugin, for example), the Thickboxes would magically start working in FireFox, but the sidebar and footer wouldn’t draw themselves.? Well, that makes sense, because the sidebar still includes calls to functions which are no longer available since they’ve been deactivated.? So, just remove those references, and you’re all set, right?? Wrong.? Once I removed the calls, the page would draw itself and the Thickboxes once again crapped out on me.

This process continued until I got up and left the computer in a huff.? While puffing a cigarette, it dawned on me that while I had been troubleshooting the sidebar plugins, the problem might in fact be the footer
that did not get loaded when the plugins were deactivated.? I took a look at the footer, and lo-and-behold, there was but one piece of code which was not native to WordPress: the Performancing Metrics tool.? This tool requires you to load a JavaScript bit at the footer of the page.? When I removed this code, the Thickboxes work fine.

I can deal with losing the PFF Metrics, but they are in fact quite nice and quite illuminating for analyzing the traffic on this one specific section of the website.? I would prefer not to lose them, if I can help it.? I am *not* about to lose the Thickboxes, since I very much want to use them for vBlogging, assuming that it’s possible.? I submitted a new article to the Performancing support site, hoping to get some answers.? I also queried the original creator (scroll way down) of the Thickbox code, hoping that between the two sites, I can get a good solution.