Well, damn. I've gone a bit of Googling and it seems there are two versions of 1.5 and they handle comments differently. Huh. I've hacked my comments post file as directed on the Word Press support forum but my template's comments.php does not contain the line I'm supposed to comment out. Huh.

Please give it another try. Failing that, I'll restore the code I've tinkered with and give out links to nice directions, with screen captures, on how to comment using the new "safety" comment feature. Sorry for the confusion - and thanks for beta testing my blog. ;-)