The issue isn't that CommFailure was 0 or 1, it was that it wasn't there at all. That suggests it may have existed at some point with value 1, then disappeared, leaving the attribute value on the MSR side stuck (because it had no variable from Vera to use to change it). It's possible the Vera device handler has a bug and instead of setting 0 when the device is configured, it sets it to blank, which as of a couple of firmware versions ago, deletes the variable rather than setting it to an empty value. Having now created it manually, if it later disappears, that would confirm this theory -- something in the firmware is removing for some reason (or worst case, there's user_data corruption). In any case, CommFailure should always exist for Z-Wave devices, so something isn't right there, but of course, no chance that it would be researched or fixed these days. The Vera firmware thread has been long dead, no updates have been published, and questions and requests are left unanswered; I have my doubts that anyone with the knowledge (and will) is still there. Everyone's busy filling the holes in the new firmware (now four years since the acquisition).