OK heres my question and please forgive if this is answered on here. I have been looking for almost 45 min and havent found anything.

I currently have one category where the reviews happen - what I would like to have is another category for other posts but no option to review - in other words a different single.php for my non review category along with a different comments.php file.

I know it may have to do with conditionals but I havent figured it out yet. Something along the lines of:

if its category a, use certain files and if its category b uses certain files

Is this possible? If so could someone point me in the right direction? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Yes, the conditional is in_category
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/in_category

<?php

if (in_category('Reviews')) {
  //Put code here that should only happen for the reviews category
}

?>

Send me an e-mail if you need more help with this

Hi Dan, should this code go into the index.php page?

Jack: It would go every place you want to show ratings. Typically that's single.php (single post template), index.php (post list), category.php (post list), comments.php (above or below the comment text, and in the form to collect new ratings).

You can take a look at the themes the package comes with if you're not sure where things belong.