The paper by Conrey and Li "A note on some positivity conditions related to zeta and L-functions" http://arxiv.org/abs/math/9812166 discusses some of the problems with de Branges's argument. They describe a (correct) theorem about entire functions due to de Branges, which has a corollary that certain positivity conditions would imply the Riemann hypothesis. However Conrey and Li show that these positivity conditions are not satisfied in the case of the Riemann hypothesis.
So the answer is that de Branges has proved theorems in this area that are accepted, and his work on the Riemann hypothesis has been checked and found to contain a serious gap. (At least the version of several years ago has a gap; I think he may have produced updated versions, but at some point people lose interest in checking every new version.)
Update: there is a more recent paper by Lagarias discussing de Branges's work.
