Comment Approval not listing comments that need to be approved

The back story:

The user table got dead, and I only recreated one user - me - uid 1.

Comment settings were made such that authenticated users can post without approval and anonymous user comments must be approved. We will get back to this.

Comment Approval has not been showing any comments to be approved since. I only found this out today when someone I know said, "did you get my comment?".

The story so far: I reviewed the comments table, and have found that comments are being stored. They are being flagged with a 1 in comments.status, as they should be.

I then checked to make sure that the permissions were set as I described above. They were. I reset the comments module (disabled, re-enabled, redid permissions). That had no effect.

I went into comment settings (/admin/content/comment/settings ) and found that the anonymous commenting area was not editable - indicating that the permissions were not set right. I rechecked, and the permissions were, indeed, set right.

I checked with my own anonymous post - it went to the database, and even when I changed the status to 1 in MySQL, it will not show.

It appears that the comments module is looking for permissions for anonymous users and not finding them - yet I see them in the database table.

Thoughts, anyone?