I changed the comments.pho and header.php and it worked – the comments show avatars and you can reply, but then all the comments are listed again below
yes, sorry i forgot to change the staus of this post eep!
Problem was with a widget i had running that displays images from a specified category – whatever category i assigned it to display magically disappeared from the main page. weird!
i think the problem may be in where ive imported the content form my old site – a lot of the posts are incomplete and all of them are laid out in tables. Ill fix them and see what happens *fingers crossed*