I have another question for you guys. Will using similar template layouts for my websites hurt their rankings? The layouts themselves are quite nice but they are all very similar. The content of each website will be completely different, it is simply the design of the sites that are the same. Thank you.

No that won't affect your ranking.

Shouldn't matter at all. Unless of course the templates you're using is coded so poorly that it puts up barriers to getting the sites indexed. Though in that case it's not the duplication of the layout that would be casuing the problem.

are you using themes?

Every vB forum has the same/Similar code but what matters most is content.