S2member conflict with bbPress participant

WordPress V3.5.1
BuddyPress 1.6.5
bbPress 2.2.4
S2Member Pro v130221 (8 member levels)

I have just moved my group forums from BuddyPress and added a sitewide forum as per these instructions http://codex.buddypress.org/user/buddypress-site-administration/migrating-from-old-forums-to-bbpress-2/

I also ran the update roles/capabilities in s2member – other integrations.

Everything is working except for 1 thing.

Any user with a forum role of Participant cannot see the opening topic post in any thread. They can see all replies. It doesn’t matter if they created it or another user did, they can’t see the opening post.

If I change their role to Moderator they can see the opening post. But, I don’t want everyone to have moderator rights. I tried changing the capabilities of Participant (using capability manager plugin), but that didn’t work either.

If I deactivate s2member it works.

So, there is some conflict between the s2member roles and those of bbPress.

Can someone please HELP!!! This is a live site so I need to get this fixed asap – all assistance greatly appreciated!

thank you

UPDATE

I’ve found a workaround, but this looks like a bug to me.

I had all the Alternative View Protection turned on. If I uncheck nav menus (leaving the other 3 checked) it works – an s2member user with level 4 + participant roles can now see all the forum posts.

But – what is the risk of turning that off? Is this a bug? Can you provide some guidance please?

Thanks!

Thank you for reporting this important issue.

s2Member’s Alternative View Protections are still in an experimental state and we’re aware that it can cause bugs such as this one in certain environments. We’ll take this as a bug report and see if we can correct the issue in a future version of s2Member.

Thank you.