I had the same problem on the S95 (firmware 1.00k) which discovered while trying to dump the firmware. I've tested a few times with different color pictures, the cdumper.log and primary.bin are written to the card using the universal dumper script.
I noticed that with no pictures on the camera, when started with play I get the message "No Image" in white text with a white border near the edge. When func/set is pressed, I notice something black overwrite the white border. Pushing menu, I see "one" in the top left corner (the "d" doesn't overlap any menu items, so can't see black text on black background).
If I take an all white picture, I don't see any messages on the screen when camera started with play, and func/set is pushed. However, if I then push menu, I see the words "done" clearly in white. The cdumper.log and primary.bin are written successfully.
Finally, I tested with a normal picture, with varying colors up all over the frame (refracted sunlight from my coffee table), and find the no messages appear on the screen after play/func is pressed. However I see done when pushing menu, but this time I noticed it looks like "done" is masked out out of the first image and put on the menu screen. Basically, it only shows the intersection of the status message and the first image. That's why I can never see the status message without pushing menu to change the screen.
I just found in the Hello World script example, someone mentions using an extra function to change the status screen message. If you add LCDMsg_ChangeColor(a ,6) on the line below LCDMsg_SetStr(lcdmsg,msg) in the private sub PutMsg(msg) makes visible the status message on the screen (in orange) for the S95.
Hope this helps someone else who was confused by this behavior.
