if you ae talking about breaks cause you said "hit enter" it is a break as opposed to dw's gay <p> and <div> that it happily puts every friggen chance it gets to. so either hit shift-enter (or control enter i forget), or if you do it html wise, which you should cause wysiwyg is gay to begin with, just type in <BR> and it will insert a typical return as you are used to.
character spaces is a totally different thing and you could mess with styles and font tags, but i think what he said above is pretty much it.
if you want an image free try layers or iframes, i frames work nicely, especially on forum boards where everything is cgi or asp or fusion and you want to embed a frame...ok i have no idea if it works in fusion or asp, but i know it will work in cgi.

i still despise you.