Thanks for your feedback
No mods at all, ive only added a few custom forum pages... to make the comments work after publishing an article i need to: edit the article... disable comments.. save... re-edit the article and turn comments on again... it's very strange but others are now saying they are having the same problem, ive re-uploaded the files and still no change.
Thanks again for taking the time to reply with a detailed post.
Regards Darren