I give up.  I'll turn ratings off; but is there any way to clear the 50 stars I posted earlier?  ...a table in the database where I can set this to 0 or something like that?

Thanks for the follow-ups, Chris.  I am good-to-go on this one now! (except selecting 'none' will not remove the rating I just assigned).

I ran that script, then went in and removed all the old ratings (which is why I suspected this was an upgrade issue, as the 1-10 ratings were preceded by the old 'good, great, excellent, etc' ratings in the host-->list list), and did a new list with Rate1=1...Rate5=5 (which I figured out to be case-sensitive after rate1 wouldn't work), so I am now running 1-5 ratings and the drop-down no longer has the blank spaces...good-to-go.

One last question.  I assume I could follow this same procedure to scale the users' post rankings back to 5, too?  I am not creative enough to come up with 10 echelons of rankings. :) I was thinking I could delete 6-10 and then replace the graphics associated with 1-5 with the current forum bubbles, rather than try to chopshop 5 bubbles off the current graphics, if that makes sense.