I'll take a look at merging this into 0.9.8pre.6 unless you want to give it a go.

I might not get to it before release of that version however given how stressed my life is these next couple of weeks.

Well, I was basically asking if you wanted to try making the changes ot 0.9.8 yourself (or get Anpera to do it *grin*) so that it might get in and tested more quickly than if you wait for me to do it.

I ran a quick test of this on my dev server and found that it didn't seem to work correctly.

This might be due to my attempting to optimize some of it and doing so incorrectly but I don't believe that is the case.

Also, Eric requested (after I pointed this out to him) that the comment ids not be passed on the URL as he finds passing any sort of id of that sort along the URL to be the wrong solution (I could get into details, but it's not really relevant).  The solution would be to pass it via a session parameter which seemed like it should work and which is what I did rather than using the URL when I was testing (hence why I believe the error could have been mine).

I might play more with this in the future, but figured I'd mention my experiences with it here so that chaosmaker could also look at it.

The problem seemed to crop up if I went back more than two pages in the commentary, at that point it just got wonky. On the third page back it once again showed the 'last' page of comments.  Jumping back to the last page showed a blank commentary area rather than the most recent comments.

I'll look at this tonight.. I'd realized the bit about not needing to be set always, so I'd been forcing it back to 0 in what I believed were the correct places.. I probably just didn't get it right since I didn't quite understand exactly how your code worked yet.. I'll look at this later though and if it works, I'll call it good.

Nope.
I scrolled all the way back to the beginning of the village commentary (5 pages on my test server) and started scrolling forward again.  When I went back to comscroll=4, I got a blank list of commentary and the lastcommentid in the session was 'N'  (null).

This caused problems when I tried to go forward to the next comscroll (3) where it errors out with SQL errors.

Except for those edge cases, it *does* seem to work, but those edge cases are just broken

I'll look at this later.

Don't know what 'tonight' is for you , but I just looked at it. It's funny, I don't have any problems.
Perhaps you want to look at http://gehdochzuhause.chaosonline.de/logd098pre/ (very slow dyndns connection; will run from now for 10-12 hours).
You should be able to view the source (after registering), hope it helps.