Finally I seem to have managed to find the correct combination of WP plugins to stop spam from even logging a comment. Initially I had only Akismet, which, although good, logged the spam comments only after they were enterred and as a result my Popularity Contest plugin was affected which forced me to manually recount comments in order to fix the values. Bad Behaviour helped considerably but spam comments still kept avoiding the filter and thus bogging down my count. The latest one I tried was bcSpamBlock which appears to work admirably along with my other two spam blockers. For 2 weeks now I have not had a single successful spam comment logged in Akismet.
Finally…