A couple of differences exist between my local installation of drupal and STAR's  which may be causing me difficulty in
organizing/understanding the estruct layout.  The most significant 2 are:

• my template.php appears to not be called contrary to PHPTemplate rules - Or
  perhaps the functions for which I wrote an overide in  template.php doesn't exist or get called
  in the STAR installation? (I might try testing on a differenct function)
• there doesn't seem to be a 'block' menu item (in the admin
  subsection) which would allow me to define which blocks I could select
  to activate.  Just now I don't see the how the current set of
  blocks that appear in the sidebar were selected.