So I've been scouring the forum looking for the simple solution to making the Categories page my homepage - this has been discussed ad naseum, yet I haven't found the solution.

In my Settings I thought I would try adding 'categories.php' to the file path of my Vanilla install - well, that really screwed things up because now I get a 404 when I try to click on something:

"The requested URL /forums/pets/categories.phpcategories.php was not found on this server."

Now it's adding 'categories.php' onto every URL and I don't know how to fix it because I can't even get back into my Settings page. Help!

EDIT: I can now access my Settings page by going to:
http://www.MYDOMAIN.com/forums/pets/settings.php?PostBackAction=Globals

But when I correct the bad file path and click Save, I get the 404 error. Help!

JUST did that as you must have been typing your post. Yes - in conf directory in the setting.php file I was able to make the change and now all is well. SOLVED. Thank you.