Yeah I see what you mean about the code.
Like I had said, installing ario on a fresh 1.5.3 worked fine untill i started to install other naitive addons.
Figureing maybe it was just RS_form I then installed ario onto a seperate 1.5 site I have at which point the homepage gave me the exact same error message. The first site (1.5.3) is completely un touched as far as configurations go - everything is default, no sample data, i'm using php5.
The second site - was running in legacy mode, has fireboard, comunity builder, JAM, and google analytics components installed. NOT rs_form though.
On both sites I did not turn on SEF urls - although thinking into the future I did want to turn them on eventually, however they should be disabled. You said there was 3 places to look, can you remind me of the other two place? I looked in the global configuration and sef is turned off. Also I still have htaccess.txt and had never changed it (I was keeping everything as close to default as possible) on both sites.
EDIT:
I did some more web searching and I found this:
http://www.joomlajunkie.com/members...edeclare-sefreltoabs.html
Apparently legacy mode causes the 1.5 naitive template to get this error - would have ben nice to know you have seen this error before. That explains why my working site got the error but now I am wondering why I get that error when using only other naitive 1.5 addons.