Validations appear to fail as expected, but no messages appear either client or server

I have a feeling I am going to feel pretty dumb when this question gets answered, but here goes:

I started with a themed page and then added a form. No issues in the form tool, design went as expected. I can see and edited both the client and server validation error messages in the code, but not in design view (this is not normal). I added a validation to enforce unique value required to one form field, I then did some editing to the Captcha appearance and tested page. On testing, the required form fields do not show error messages when left empty and when the add record button is pressed, I see the server activity behavior, the page redirects to itself with the "invalid" URL value set to "true", but no messages appear at any stage of testing. I have not added any of the insert record or other planned behaviors on this page, pretty simple function, but I would like to know what I have missed in my validations before finishing page as I do use these functions quite a bit.

All extensions were brought to current this morning and even though nothing crashed, I reset the view and deleted cache files. I work on a Mac 10.8 with DW 5.5.

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing what I am missing