I extended the ui dialog component to fire an event when the dialog is first initialized only to find there's already an undocumented 'create' event. It would be helpful if the 'create' event was mentioned in the documentation.
Either way when I run validate.form() or I submit the form the default messages that I've set are not applied. I can see that they exist in the jQuery.validator.defaults object but they all seem to be completely ignored. I've run out of ideas at this point and would welcome a fresh look. I'm running jQuery 1.4.2.