html editor adding formats & characters?

I’m not sure why, but whenever I try to post a comment, or a link and I want to use the apostrophe (‘), it gets surrounded by slashes:

e.g. my ‘name’

would appear like so

my /’name’/

Even when I’ve switched off the html editor, why does this still happen? I thought I’d only need to use html codes for characters when using visual rich text editor. For instance, when I try to input the code for “û” it didn’t show. But when I pasted it in, it appeared fine.

For posts, I have also had trouble with the html editor adding <strong></strong> tags everywhere, again I don’t know why. When I try to edit the html source, and delete them, resave them, they appear again.

Someone helped me out with the <strong></strong> tag thing by editing the entire page via GoLive but I’m not comfortable just yet with doing that.

I’m using WP 2.0
(I won’t leave links because I don’t know if that’s cool)

Any help would be appreciated, and my apologies in advance – I’m really trying to understand this stuff so please don’t be mad if I’m a bit clueless.

Thanks!