WordPress 2 comes with a standard WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) Visual Editor. It is based on TinyMCE … and it is not bug free 😉 Within Safari (3.0.3, Mac) for example, I always loose all <br ⁄> and <p> <⁄p> tags when I switch from the visual to the code view.

So, how can the visual editor be turned off?

In "Options" > "Writing" of the admin-area you don’t find nothing. It’ because this setting is referring to the user⁄author. That’s why it is located in the "Users" section: Simply edit the user you want to change (click on the "Edit" action). Then check off the checkbox "Use the visual editor when writing". That’s it. Now the good old HTML-editor is back again when you edit or create new blog postings.