Adobe Fire­works is a pretty bril­liant pro­gram for rapidly devel­op­ing web lay­outs in a kind of best-of-both-worlds way that enjoys the ben­e­fits of both vec­tor and bitmap design, with­out all the frus­tra­tions that come along with smart objects. Its text han­dling is also superb, offer­ing a whole lot of cus­tomis­able set­tings that are very use­ful for mock­ing up web designs, not read­ily avail­able in either Pho­to­shop or Illustrator.

How­ever, it is not with­out its faults. On Vista, when typ­ing text in Fire­works things can occa­sion­ally go very, very wrong. The solu­tion at least ini­tially is to turn off the “Auto Kern” option in the Prop­er­ties dia­log — but this removes one of the big ben­e­fits of using Fire­works in the first place!

There are other options. The prob­lem will go away (some­times) when the file is closed and Fire­works is restarted — this is hit and miss. More per­ma­nently, dis­abling Vista’s fancy-pants Aero theme (the thing that makes all win­dow bor­ders trans­par­ent, gives that snazzy Start + Tab effect, etc.) will ensure you have a glitch-free Fire­works font experience.

The real solu­tion? Sneak into Adobe HQ and write a patch to fix the stu­pid thing!