OK, I got to it before giving him a chance. It was just a silly problem where the closing </i> was missing from all /me's, because it was provided always, if the new code was off. Fixed. The fact that the new code let the error propogate past that single line of chatter, and into the rest of the chatterbox (but not the rest of the page) isn't the fault of the new code, but rather how often we "screen" the HTML -- once per rendering of the nodelet, rather then once per line.