Back in ’52, the situation you are describing is quite normal. When sites are first indexed by Google, they enjoy decent rankings the first couple of weeks, then something triggers Google to place sites in the Sandbox for the next 6-18 months. No one knows the exact triggers to get into, or out of the sandbox, but your situation is quite normal.
As long as you had links prior to the last update in October, you should be showing PR. Google has been weird lately, showing old PR results. There is no way to check the “real” PR, but you can check what your “visual” PR is at this site:
http://www.mcdar.net/q-check/datatool.asp
Page Rank doesn’t mean a whole lot for how you will rank. Yes, higher PR sites come up higher in the SERPs, but you will also see some lower PR sites show up along side them. The strategy for ranking well is to pick keywords you can compete on, optimize your site’s content for those words and then get as many quality backlinks as you can. If you do this you should begin to see results on Yahoo and MSN, then one day Google will let you out of the Sandbox to give you the good traffic.