Just purchased Scrivener last week and I notice that the spell check does not work. The only way I can check it is to push Control : and it will check the next word, then I have to repeat that for every word.
Did you by any chance purchase Scrivener from Apple? We are tracking down what appears to be a bug that a recent operating system update introduced in the Mac App Store version. So far we have found no cases of this happening in the direct-sale version. So if you are using the Apple version, try downloading the direct-sale version from our website and running that. It will check for your purchase receipt and activate itself, so there is no harm in doing that long-term.
If, however you do wish to use the direct-sale version long-term, you will want to migrate your support data (the Apple version cannot access the typical Mac settings locations). Once you’ve done that you can go on using the direct-sale version until the end of time.
I’m actually seeing this bug in the direct download version I think. I’ll contact support directly.