Merging cells in tables causing columns to overlap

[ladyrae]

I have recently been seeing a problem with tables I'm creating (from a table stylesheet). When columns are merged, it is for some reason causing the content of one column to jump over and sit on top of the content in its neighbor column. Then its own column appears empty. Content always seems to jump left, never right.

Fortunately this only seems to happen in editing mode, and doesn't seem to affect the output. But it is frustrating to try to edit these tables, and it also seems that, when I attempt to select one to copy and paste elsewhere, I can't select the table on its own. Instead, all of the text that comes above the table in the topic get selected also.

Has anyone seen this before?? I'm attaching two images, one showing what it looks like in editing mode, another showing how it looks when I preview the topic.

Thanks!

ladyrae