>maybe so, but I had suspected that as well and pasted the "purple quote" into another post with no problem....

Did you put ["pre"] and ["/pre"] markup around it as I
have done here,  and as I suspect bridget did in her offending
(as distinct from offensive) post?

I think that the ["pre"] and ["/pre"] cause the same behaviour as the ["url"] and ["/url"] that we have noted with long links.

What does this post do to the display?

[edit-in later] Having established that this is indeed the problem, I've broken the red bit into shorter lines.