What is the deal with the editor/preview?

The editor and preview functions are very odd on this forum as they add in junk characters where spacings are.  They definitely are not WYSIWYG.  I’m finding that the worst mistake I can make in posting is previewing…it looks fine, but then adds these extraneous characters when posted.  It took me half a dozen edits of different types (two different edit buttons available behave differently) to add some info to a prior post and then clean out the junk characters.  All but one of those edits was playing whack-a-mole with the junk characters it added.

@djensen:

I’m not sure. I’ll have to look into it.

Thanks.  FYI, I tested this on two different OS’s (XP and Windows7) on two different machines running old and new versions of IE with the same problem.  It doesn’t like double spaces from what I can see.  (Although it is possible that I might be arrowing over sometimes, but not tabbing over.)  It posts fine if I don’t preview.  If I preview or edit I get square characters showing up after I post it.  When I then go back to edit with the little pencil on sheet icon at the bottom of the post I can see A’s with circumflex’s on them that I have to hunt down and delete.

@Tall:

I was informed that if I wouldn’t use more than ONE SPACE anywhere that those unwelcome squares wouldn’t show up. It seems to work. It takes a bit of practice NOT to put TWO spaces between sentences, though. And no paragraph indentions, either.

Thanks.  I suspected that might be the case, but I was hoping that wouldn’t be the answer as there isn’t much chance of my breaking a multi-decade habit of using proper spacing to work around a bug.  Instead I’m likely to just skip previews and/or let the poor reader read through the blocks.  :-(