The Loop gone rogue: goes on endlessly..

Hi Everyone,

Just know that I’m a programmer by trade (though only been programming in C#/.NET last two years), so I’m having a hard time as a WordPress and PHP newb.

I’m trying to use a theme called Atahualpa. I say ‘trying’ because I want the center column to display a featured post (click on read more to read more); then underneath featured post, I want there to be a split of the center colummn where left of column will display News and right will display Deals. The featured post might be a News post or a Deal post. Anyway, I’ve had NO success here so I decided to step back and first learn the basics of the loop.

While trying to ‘learn the basics of the loop’, I managed to mess it up. I was reading the codex regarding the loop and modifying stuff, and here’s my tweaked loop:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); update_post_caches($posts); ?>
		<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" >
		</div>
		<?php bfa_post_kicker('<div class="post-kicker">','</div>'); ?>
		<?php bfa_post_headline('<div class="post-headline">','</div>'); ?>
		<?php bfa_post_byline('<div class="post-byline">','</div>'); ?>
		<?php bfa_post_bodycopy('<div class="post-bodycopy clearfix">','</div>'); ?>
		<?php bfa_post_pagination('<p class="post-pagination"><strong>'.__('Pages:','atahualpa').'</strong>','</p>'); ?>
		<?php bfa_post_footer('<div class="post-footer">','</div>'); ?>
	<?php endwhile; ?>

Let me clarify: It SEEMS that the loop runs over and over, since it displays only 2 of my posts over and over for a good minute and then times out with this error:
Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in C:\xampplite\htdocs\wordpress\wp-content\plugins\tweet-this\tweet-this.php on line 55

This Plugin was working fine before, the only thing I did was alter the loop a bit. Please don’t point me to the codex as I’m already looking at that and obviously still missing something. If anyone can analyze the code a bit, that’d be great. Thanks!