I suspect that the spacing is meant to be there, but the TeX badness was huge no matter what, so it tried to do the "least bad" thing. I've run into this so man

I suspect that the spacing is meant to be there, but the TeX badness was huge no matter what, so it tried to do the "least bad" thing. I've run into this so many times when trying to make visually appealing layouts in TeX.