A brief summary of what I have picked up since posting yesterday.
All is not lost, but you do have to think about how to do this best for your particular circumstances.
If you used to have a wordpress blog and are now self hosted, there is a fix described in Celia’s comment on yesterday’s post which you can do.
If you have ever had or forgotten you had a WordPress or a Gravatar account or user name then you need to break the link between your email address and that account in order to be able to comment from that email address without logging in to wordpress. I am still not quite sure how you do that in WordPress, possibly in the Dashboard → Users → Personal Settings Section which at the very bottom has a section called Account Details. I am guessing that deleting your email address and the website in that section will break the link but will edit this post if I find out differently. I think you can also change the website that your email address links to here too, though I am not sure if you can put a non wordpress blog in at this point. Again I will let you know if I find out.
That section looks like this :
On the Gravatar site you can go to the section called Manage your Gravatars and delete any extraneous email addresses there.
Finally figured that out tonight. Sometimes I am very slow to find where things are put, I thought email adresses would be in a profile section and not in the Gravatars tab, as I thought that was where you did the thing with the photos. Still you always find what you are looking for in the last place you look!
An other option, as described by Val in her comments yesterday, is simply to alter the email address you use to comment with, either use a different one, or alter the one you use, then WordPress won’t recognise you and you will be able to comment without logging in. You will be held in moderation for the first time you comment with a new address on my blog, but after that you should be able to comment away as before.
Most importantly and something I had overlooked till now. If you are ‘logged in’ and you want to check which site your comment will link to, try doing this:
In the bottom right corner you can see a bit where it says Log out/Change. If you click Change you can then alter anything in those three lines (email address, name as it appears on the blog, and website url) to suit yourself. As I said if you change the actual email address then it will go to moderation first but that’s fine by me. There is also an option to comment using a Twitter or Facebook account which you can explore, by clicking on the icons next to the WordPress Logo as in this screen grab 
but that requires you to authorise WordPress to have access to that account.
I have read a few blog posts on the subject and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change back for now, so I do hope you all continue to comment in whatever guise you choose and if you get stuck let me know and I will do my best to help.
Thanks all of you for helping with this. At least we are trying to figure it out together and that’s what matters.
Zeb Bakes 
I honestly think that we have the best team of bloggers out there.. this is so helpful joanna and thanks to celia also. The sharing of info is brilliant.. thank you.. c
I don’t know if we can sort it out, but we’ll have a go. I have some lovely photos to put up later as my techy self is a bit limited :)
hi jo..i’ve cancelled my wordpress account and i’ve done the email changing thing but it still reverts to my old account..i will keep trying different things..thanks so much for all your amazing techno input and documentation..x
hi jane, can you try using the ‘change’ option – where it says log out when you have drafted a comment and before you press Post Comment – then just change your email so that it says something else, i.e. teawithhazel@nowhereland or just take the last letter off the email address for example – then in the third line put the url of your blog as it is now. I know what your email address is so it makes no difference to me what you put in that field. Post the comment, then see if next time you comment you repeat this it should remember your previously inputted details. Sorry I can’t explain this better. I think it might be an idea also to email support@wordpress.com and ask them to help if cancelling your wordpress account and checking on the gravatar site hasn’t worked either. x Joanna
Thanks for your work on that…will try changing my email…see if that works. So annoying…why fix what’s not broken!
You should be all right as you blog at WordPress, have you had problems commenting recently Bridget? I was just reading your Spring Morning post – lovely pictures :)
Have to log into WordPress before I can comment on WordPress blogs which is a nuisance. As for commenting on Blogger……I won’t even go there!
Have to log in before I can post comment which is a nuisance…don’t know why this was changed. As for commenting on Blogger blogs…..
I’m with you now! Do you tick the little ‘remember me’ box when you login to wordpress to write your blog, it should remember you as well when you go to comment on other wordpress blogs if you do, though it logs you out after a certain time or if you restart your computer I find. I tried asking why it was changed but the Happiness Engineers have not responded to that question so we may never know ?