I hope I will be able to get some help here as I have had some issues in the past. Basically, I have JComments and K2 installed on my site: www.knoticalnovelties.com. My question relates to what I have noticed in the Item creator portion of K2. Under the pane where you enter the content of a new article there are options to either turn on or off JComments. Does anyone know if this will actually work, or if I should even bother trying to use it.

The setting you are describing is not coming from K2, it's coming from the JComments plugin, i assume. So It depends to the plugin.

Since this is more then a month old, I wonder if you found an answer, especially since Arlyn jumped in almost at the same time :-)
But those buttons are, in fact, JComments plugin and they do work (most of the time). Some times I found it working better to disable comments in "Item view..." settings in your right pane...

BTW, admins - is really necessary to use captcha when users are already logged in?.... Really?....