Block shows "Array" and nothing else

Excuse me if this sounds jumbled, it's time for bed. I have this same problem on all Similar/Related modules and have never been able to solve it, but really need this feature. The region/blocks are completely fine. I have no other problems with any other module, and I am in a transition period getting ready to launch a fairly large news website(It's actually live all the way in off-line mode so that i can get into a good flow and work out all the bugs). I have the typical article content type and articles vocab. I use contemplate for my articles, and the typical node-article.tpl file. I have tried calling the block both in contemplate and my tpl file. Nothing is wrong with the way I'm calling the block or the configuration of the module. I did a little research and apparently getting the "Array" problem is theme related. I'm not sure where to go from here, so if anyone could offer their help, I owe you a debt of gratitude. I can offer up my template.php etc. but i don't really understand what could be wrong. most of it is just an excess of views template mods for my sorted news. anyway, this is how i call my regions (the normal way I'm assuming):

<?php
function cumbersome_regions() {
  return array(
    'right' => t('right sidebar'),
    'content' => t('content'),
    'header' => t('header'),
    'footer' => t('footer'),
    'floater' => t('floater'),
    'inline1' => t('inline 1'),
    'quoteblock' => t('quoteblock'),
    'tickerblock' => t('tickerblock'),
	'pollblock' => t('pollblock'),
	'rotatebanner' => t('rotatebanner'),
	'relatedlinks' => t('relatedlinks')
  );
}