"messages status" div not showing up when submitting page comment
I would look at the following permissions:



to see what is going on.  On first blush, I'm going to assume post comments without approval is checked for more roles than you want or expect.

You can also surf over to admin/content/node-type/CONTENT-TYPE and click on "Comment settings" to see if anything is set for that specific type of node.

If these don't give you any "AHA!" moments, look around to see if any other comment approval modules are in place on the system.

Also, a lot of page.tpl's in D6 wrap their various content areas with something like this:

&lt;?php if ($messages): ?&gt;
  &lt;div id="messages"&gt;
    &lt;?php print $messages; ?&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
&lt;?php endif; ?&gt;


which basically means if you don't have any content for that area, there is no need to print an empty &lt;div&gt; which probably explains why you aren't seeing anything (eg, there was no message in the first place).