marc, I had this same problem with a form from PayPal. WordPress adds break tags for hidden form fields. No idea why.
I installed the “Toggle wpautop” plugin, which adds a “Disable wpautop” option to posts/pages. Works great – lets you manually format vertical spacing.
As to the upgrade, it failed to activate – blows over my max memory limit – AFTER blowing away the old copy of the plugin. Not very kind.
Would be nice if there were a way to download the previous stable version.
