That page also had other includes in it though. I was just thinking about a plain page with nothing else but:
<?
require_once("/ubbthreads/main.inc.php");
$userob = new user;
$user = $userob -> authenticate("U_Groups");
?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Testing</title>
</head>
<body>
<? include("/ubbthreads/addons/ubbttopthreads.php"); ?>
</body>
</html>
And see what happens.

Did you remove these lines from your ubbttopthreads.php file:
require_once("/ubbthreads/main.inc.php");
$userob = new user;
$user = $userob -> authenticate("U_Groups");
We are doing them seperately before the <html> tag.