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FYI...I answered my own question.
For the Topics, I used phpmyadmin to change the ID of the individual topic, as this seems to be how they're sorted (perhaps by default...I didn't look that far).
For categories, I changed the index.php files so that the sorting is done by CatID instead of Name. This way, at least I could go into the database and revise the CatID of the individual categories to get them to display in the order required, instead of alphabetically.
Ordering functionality would be very helpful in future versions...
Cheers!
JC