Well, that was weird. My comments are now working again, but I don’t feel that I’ve solved anything, I’ve just opened up a bigger problem, I can’t yet comprehend!
I de-activated all my plug-ins, deleted all the WordPress db tables, and then re-installed the tables from my back-up – at this point, comments were working.
I re-activated all the plug-ins, and comments were no longer working.
I narrowed it down, and found that the activation of Akismet was now obstructing the comments facility from working. When it was activated, it was also timing-out when I tried to enter the API-key.
Similarly, I now can’t get WP-Stats to show – that’s timing-out as well. So, I’ve deactivated that again.
Whilst comments are now working, the lingering worry is that the activation/de-activation of Akismet wasn’t making any difference prior to my re-building the database – and I didn’t knowingly change anything.
Given that the comments were timing-out before, and now Akismet and WP-stats are timing out, the common factor would seem to be the connection to the WordPress.com API key, but I don’t understand why (or what’s changed)…
