Forgive me if this is a really basic question, but I'm finding it rather confusing.

I'm using comments on pages, and I want to stop the comment reply form appearing until needed, but the 'Leave a Reply' form box displays on the pages regardless, and I can't figure out how to make it appear only when someone wants to post a comment.

I've enabled #'allow comments on pages' and have styled the footer for 'page' pages in ATO settings: %comments('Leave a comment', 'Comments (1)', 'Comments (%)', 'dontshow')%
That all seems to work and I can see the footer bar, but the form box is also showing.

Is there a way to stop the box displaying until needed? It seems like a really basic requirement; am I just being dense here?

Try this and see if it will do what you want. Add the following to the CSS Inserts options

div#respond form {
    display: none;
}
div#respond:hover form {
    display: block;
}

Wow, thanks for the quick response, JD.

That kind of works, it hides the main box but still shows the 'Leave a Reply' bit, with the box appearing when hovered over (which is pretty neat actually).
I was aiming for hiding the whole thing and just using the link in the page footer in the ATO Post/page info items.

off hand I don't know how you are going to do that unless you write a script (which I can't help you with). The link is just an on page link to the response area which 'is' the form. You will need a jscript that looks for the mouse click on the link you want to target and it will change the visibility of the form making it be shown.

OK, thanks for the explanation JD, that helps me understand how it works. Writing a script is somewhat beyond my abilities, but I can try styling the comment box.