So the MT upgrade and move to a new host seems to have eliminated the commenting errors, but the old "trust commenters" plugin for MT 3.x does not function with MT 4.x, and no one has written an upgrade for the plugin yet. So I'm going to open up comments and there will be no moderation of the comments for a while. I haven't gotten any spam yet, but I apologize if anything offensive shows up here. I just believe strongly in open commenting, and I would rather risk the spam than continue to delay discussion. Once the trust commenter function is implemented for the new version, you will all have to have a comment "trusted" one more time.