Wordpress Contact Form 7 verification messages do not go away

I have a wordpress template that I bought and that works pretty well so far.  I am currently testing the "Contact Us" page that uses Contact Form 7.  When I test it and purposely leave off required form information, the proper verification messages pop up in the fields where info is missing after I click the SEND button.  But when I go to those fields to fill them in, the pop-up message does not go away and I cannot see the field or select it to add input.  I have modified some of the .php pages to do things like not show comments, etc.  but don't know what, if anything, i did that would cause this behavior that deviates from the template design.

You can see the contact form on my testing site at: http://www.dsaengineering.com/wordpress/contacts/

and you can go to the "Contact Us' form on the demo site by clicking "Contacts" in the Header menu: http://www.templatemonster.com/demo/40425.html