I think it was a week or so after you rolled out the control panel feature, I must emphasize though that it was working correctly and I was using the same client also. Hope that helps, I'll try the other Peercoin wallet and report back.
hmm I don't know what is going on. I used Peerunity to sign messages and it also failed for me. The interesting part is that Peerunity fails to verify a message signed by the Peercoin reference wallet, and vice-a-versa.
I'll open a bug with Peerunity to see if they can offer some assistance.
Thanks for this.