Issues with DropCap & Tracking

Hi,
I have a dropcap character style nested into my main body paragraph style. Almost all drop caps have a space after it, before the main body text. The only exception is one or two paragraphs where the drop cap is the first alphabet of a word, and thus no space follows the dropcap.

Recently, the tracking space between dropcap and the next character became inconsistent, causing collision of text in certain cases as shown below.

Drop Cap Character Style (Tracking: 170)

Results: Tracking of 170 based on the Character Style is applied in most paragraphs.

Tracking of 170 is not taking effect in a few paragraphs, as shown below. Body text collides with nested Dropcap:

Here are the Paragraph Style settings for the Body text:

Some workarounds that were suggested but didn't work include:

- 2 lines, 2 characters under drop cap settings - this amplifies the inconsistent spacing:

Collided text becomes spaced:

while all other instances become too widely spaced:

- Increase the tracking for the drop caps character style: collided dropcaps doesn't budge while other dropcaps (which are wellspaced) move.
- saving INDD file under a new name to see if changes are effected in new file. No change.

Looking for advise! It's been a long project so I'm not at a stage to create a new INDD file from scratch!