about how many people are signed up for FREEREPUBLIC total?
160,000 -- but a large part of those are probably troll accounts.
There have been roughly 167,000 "sign ups" to date.
Of that total, some were quickly-banned trolls, some were additional screen names for the same person (usually banned trolls trying again), and some were people who just wanted to change their screen name, eg. "Dales"/"Hugh Akston".
At least 164396 ; ~)