Comments not working properly

Folks are able to make comments to blog posts fine... but it won't let me (as the admin account and signed in) make comments to their comments/answer their questions... and since we promote folks to ask us questions this is a big issue. When I am logged in as the admin account I click "reply" to a comment and then type the reply and once I hit "submit" the processing gets stuck in processing and won't post my comment, no matter how long I wait, how many times I try it again, etc... see attachment

consequently- the site also isn't reading the admin avatar correctly for the commenting part- not sure if these are related