I am sorry for taking so long to respond to this, I just saw this post and a couple more in this section of the forum ( I am really missing the old system of showing the newest post to the forum at the bottom of the front page ) Thank you JR for taking care of this.
Anyway, anyway I don’t know what the issue is with the Comments closed message, Just know if a thread is truly closed to comment it will be grayed out in the forum lists ( see Weilyns Art Gallery which is stickied in the Art gallery section for an example) However I did experience the problem you spoke of here with not being able to reply when I tried to reply to this post. For some reason clicking on the message box below did nothing and I couldn’t type. What I did was click the Bold button on the tool bar and that resolved the issue and I was again able to type. I am going to bring this issue up with Jeff so he can inform Ben about it.