How do I display bare, stripped content with no menus, footers, etc?
Main layout of a page is done in the page.tpl.php file. You have to override that templates for your bare pages in order to not output anything you don't want to see on the page. The correct way to override the used templates for a particular situation is to use suggestions.

From the Drupal 6 Template Suggestions, you can see that the suggestions to override this templates are summarized as page-[front|internal/path].tpl.php. So, out of the box, you only have to option to provide a bare template for either the front page of the site or all pages starting with a given path. There is no suggestion that allow you to override the page.tpl.php template for node pages of a specific content type.

But if you look at the page.tpl.php documentation, you see that the template has access to a $node object: The node object, if there is an automatically-loaded node associated with the page, and the node ID is the second argument in the page's path (e.g. node/12345 and node/12345/revisions, but not comment/reply/12345). Using this information, you can use the template preprocessing in your theme to add an additional page.tpl.php suggestion.

function THEME_preprocess_page(&amp;$variables) {
  if (!empty($variables['node']) {
    $node =&amp; $variables['node'];
    $op = arg(2);
    if (empty($op) || $op == 'view') {
      $variables['template_files'][] =  'page-'. str_replace('_', '-', $node-&gt;type);;
    }
  }
}


This should add the page-&lt;content type&gt;.tpl.php template suggestion for node pages. You can then create the page-barepage.tpl.php file with your simplified markup.

Keep in mind that this will not prevent Drupal from processing and rendering any blocks for the page, it will only prevent them from being outputted in the page.