Replying to say you are correct and GUI/Windows WordPerfect was completely 100% broken when dealing with 'closing tags'. Some people knew & liked to use the codes, but the basic GUI editing was just defective and caused your formatting to spill out randomly. (at least in vs 5 & 6)

Obviously I get this with HTML, but the Mac & MS Word approach of 'object oriented formatting' was just a much better execution for mouse operation.