OK I discovered one scenario where it adds the extra <br />. If I press the ENTER key twice in a row, it will add a <br />. I realize having two paragraphs in a row is bad form, but I do it because I am in the middle of editing and I want to keep one section separated from another until I am finished editing. Or maybe I want to add something like an image or a table and I don't know exactly where I want to put it. I will eventually remove the extra <p>'s but in the short term I want them there. The problem is that it is hard to get rid of once it is there and it isn't even obvious that it is there (RH does not show a symbol like it does for a paragraph). We are trying to be consistant in our styles and so if we want extra space between lines, we change our style in the CSS. So our policy is to avoid <br>'s whenever possible. We now have a lot of places in our documentation where the extra <br> is making a larger gap between lines or images and the author did not realize it was there. So I have to go searching for these and remove them manually.
I think RH is thinking about browser compatibility and some browsers may ignore double <p>'s. So RH is thinking that the author wanted an extra blank line, and since some browsers will ignore double <p>'s, it puts in a <br /> because that is what it thinks the author wanted. I just wish RH wouldn't try to outsmart me and do what I told it to do.
I doubt I can convince Adobe to not do this, so I think I will just have to try to figure out what conditions make this happen (I already discovered one) and try to avoid them.
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