Wordpress Visual Text Editor inserting Garbage

[Normandy Cow]

I am getting seriously fed up with the Wordpress visual text editor - it keeps inserting all sorts of useless garbage into the HTML and I then have to go in and clean it all up.

For example, I've just been messing around with the layout of one of my pages, deleting and adding lines to improve the cosmetics of the page, only to find that all the following gumph has appeared in the HTML:

<span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px"><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px"><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px"></span></font></span></span></font></span></span></font></span><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px"><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px"><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px">
</span></font></span></span></font></span></span></font></span><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px"><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px"><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px">
</span></font></span></span></font></span></span></font></span><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px"><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px"><span class="text"><font size="1"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 13px">

Surely all this must have a detrimental effect on the page loading and the search engine spiders? Not to mention having to wade through it all when you do want to go in and manually tweak the HTML!

I've gone in and deleted it all, but has anyone else had this problem, and are there any suggestions for how we can avoid this happening?

Thankx!