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It's all good. I came up through support in my early career, which is why I keep finding myself on the forums. I spent a lot of time walking people through extracting winsock.dll from CABs on their original Windows install floppies. Good times. 
There's such a wide variety of experience here that I'm always trying to walk that line of steering people towards solutions without getting them in too deep if something goes wrong. I usually approach that by going step-by-step when things are predictable, and then tapering off the instructions as the risk increases.
It's great that the approach you took works, and it's an interesting option in a pinch. I don't think that I'd be comfortable recommending manually removing them through safe mode.
What I worry about when having people manually work in directories managed by auto-updaters is that *future* updates may not be reliable. I've heard that concern expressed by engineers on teams that own those updaters (not the WU team specifically), and because we do a lot of manual messing around with files that would otherwise be automatically managed by the updater for our own testing, I've definitely seen sporadic flakiness on random test machines as a result.
I always worry about people making changes that might have repercussions long after they've moved on and forgotten about doing it. It's probably fine (famous last words), but keep an eye on it for a couple updates to make sure that you're staying patched.
In terms of the editor. The Forum software is built by Jive Software. It's not the best rich-text editor I've used in the browser, but certainly not the worst. Personally, I *hate* that operating systems paste rich/HTML text formatting by default. I wish that I could just disable it as a system-wide preference. It's the worst. I use "Paste and Match Formatting" on Mac wherever possible these days. I think it's like "Paste Special > Plaintext" (at least in Excel) on Windows.
The editor is building HTML under the hood, so you can actually click the HTML link in the editing toolbar and close the offending formatting tag, but that's a pretty horrible user experience. I assume that it's technically doing the right thing by leaving the formatting tags open, because the formatting that you pasted never changed back the normal text. I think the assumption that it's making is correct, but it's not ideal by any means. You can usually start a new paragraph or bulleted list (which will coax the editor into closing that tag) and then gingerly backspace into it.
There's also an Advanced Editor link (at least for me) in the upper right of the reply window. That gives you some more formatting options like font and style. It actually works better than the default editor in a lot of ways. I'm not sure why it isn't the default choice. It must be more lightweight or more broadly compatible...
Hi Jeromie,
Thank you! Ordinarily I'd never go to the extreme of obliterating sfw, however, this situation was unique. I record copious notes of all changes, prior, during & post, so, even if my memory fails, my notes never do. Learnt the hard way years ago
Thank you for the formatting guidance, HTML & Advanced both available and functioning as per design.
I am grateful for your input & assistance Jeromie.
Cheers.
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