I tested your example with 1.2-mingus and it works properly.
Sorry, but I did it only after correcting a bug (or is it a feature?) in the Markdown-Plugin (see this post).
Maki,
I expreience the same problem on my blog at http://rain.xidus.net. But – with the exact same posts- I don’t expreience it on my local machine. I get the feeling it probably has something to do with the version of PHP used: my local copy is 4.3.2 (with the Zend engine, on PPC, if you’re interested) while the version on xidus is 4.1.2. I’m going to continue ot look into this, and see if the php version is indeed the problem.
Michel Fortin, who ported Markdown to PHP, has released version 1.0b8 of Markdown PHP. It fixes the extra < problem. Grab it from his site.
Please remark that his plugin enables Markdown for comments resulting in a unusual (for comment writers) linebreaking. You can change this by commenting out remove_filter('comment_text', 'wpautop'); and add_filter('comment_text', 'Markdown', 6); in the plugin (i.e. put two slashes // at the beginning of these two lines).
