Tricky one. It turned out that it was the use of the ZigZag skin that introduced this problem. With ZigZag, a folder may have both a comment and description, but Tiger obviously gives prio to the description once it has been entered. The workaround for now if you move from ZigZag to another skin is to first select ZigZag again, then delete the wrong description using the folder property panel, then move to whatever skin you like.

I had a suspicion that the .info file entry was coming from another skin, but I wasn't about to start laboriously testing all of them.

It's not just Tiger that gets tripped up by this - virtually all of my skins do, as well. Minimal does not, and the reason is simple. In Minimal, at level==0, it's grabbing albumDescription. In my skins, at any level, they're grabbing description, since that should be the same at level==0 - no need to check the level.

Wouldn't another solution be for the jAlbum core to write description out to the .info file whenever it's modified at the top level?

BTW, I chose Tiger for the demo just to avoid the inevitable, "are you sure this isn't a skin bug" question.