using the built in bb module - all of the topics in each forum appear as a tall column of words - it appears to be wrapped at each word. this makes each topic very very tall and leaves a huge gap 30% or so of the browser width for the other sections, such as number of replies.
anyone got any pointers about how i can attribute more width to the topics space and stop the word wrapping?
is this a common problem?

sorry to post such a trivial prob here but i have been searching for info about this on this site with no luck.

not sure what exactly is happening here, but it sounds like either a theme/template issue or maybe browser related? You could try the following:

1. switch to the default theme and template set and see if you run into the same problems.

2. if there just isn't enough room for the newbb tables you can try hiding any blocks on the left and right sides in "System" -> "Blocks"

If neither of these two suggestions make any difference, please post an url so we can see the behavior, or if that is not possible, a screenshot displaying the issue. Do the forums at this website display the same way?

I sorted it.
it seems that the table width parameters were too wide in the 'view forum' html page - like allowing 15% for number of posts (as this is a digit it would have taken several thousandmillion posts to fill the column)