Yeah, that's something that's always kind of bugged me about Drupal, but fixing it has never been of huge practical importance before now. Permalinks to comments on the first page aren't necessarily permanent because comments can change pages, too.

I guess it has to do with comments being a plug-in rather than a first-class citizen in Drupal 5? I wonder if an upgrade would fix it. I've been reluctant to upgrade Drupal because of the large amount of customization I've done by hacking random source code.