OK, the Captcha issue has been bugging me for quite a while. It seemed that it might have been the 1.9.6264.0 build. So, I decided to upgrade 1.9.7174.0 even though dasBlog for .Net 2.0 is right on the corner.
Well, indeed, after the upgrade the comment Captcha is back, and the mysterious timeout issue (it may or may not be related) seems to have been fixed as well.
