I have just found a work-around for a strange bug in IE6, when rendering empty paragraph elements. It seems to be related to this ‘Peekaboo’ bug, involving SPAN elements within styled containers, but only the pathology is similar, not any obvious causes.

Basically, an empty <p></p> would cause IE6 to mis-render entire sections of the page, making them flicker in and out of visibility when the chrome was resized, or when the text was highlighted. Firefox rendered the original text without problem.