WP1.5 commenting doesn’t work

I upgraded from 1.2 to 1.5 and commenting seems to be f*cked. First I left it at the default settings, after I had to approve myself (with the same name, email and URI) for like the third time I unchecked that option and instead installed Spamwords, which worked well with WP1.2
Trouble then was instead of blacklisting the IPs, URIs etc. it only put them onto the moderation list, so I still had to manually label the comments as spam. Then I removed the plugin again and tried the builtin blacklist, since it seemed to be working for everybody else. Now, no comments at all got through to the actual website, but they show up in the wp_comments table marked as spam. WTF? I don’t know much about the inner workings of WP, but this can’t be right ??

Anyway, if anyone feels like telling what I am doing wrong, please check out my blog at https://fear.mybigmouth.com/2005/03/09/test-post/
Current spam protection settings are:
– everybody can add a comment
– doesn’t have to fill in name + email
– blacklist contains the word tigerspice
– comments from open and insecure proxies are being blacklisted
– no plugins installed

Any help very much appreciated!!