What are some common wordpress formatting workarounds?
 

Seems like I have a problem with just about every wordpress blog I touch.

Bold doesn't work sometimes. Line breaks don't work sometimes. Apply a format to one line and it gets applied to an entire paragraph. Very frustrating.

I've been using (div style="height:20px;"></div) to force line breaks.

I'm trying to save myself some time and frustration. Are there any other workarounds you use to get wordpress text looking the way you want it to look?