@woolgatherer
Thankyou so much – those little devils at Dreamhost were messing around again *trying* to be helpful but causing endless problems for us bloggers!
Commenting out that piece of code thats in a file named ‘wp-comments-popup.php’ in the root directory for Dreamhost users worked a treat.
I don’t want to tell everyone to disbable their firewall JUST to leave a comment on my blog – why should they have to?
Thanks again, you saved me a lot of leg work trying to solve this one.