This is one of those odd things that slips through quality control before a full release package. There is an artifact in the code that was there for debugging a new feature and this inadvertently made it into the production version.
This particular bug only effects the use of the auto excerpt feature. It only effects those automatically generated excerpts that may contain html tags such as <i> (italics), <strong> (bold text), <b> (also bold text), and <h1,2,3,4,5> (heading) tags.
So if you are effected by this particular issue, the fix is fairly simple and involves removing the offending script.
In the utilities.php file, the wpmem_do_excerpt function is all the way at the end. You will find line 218 to be as follows:
if( stristr( $content, '<' . $tag . '>' ) ) { echo 'string contains: ' . '< --' . $tag . '-- >';Remove everything after the opening curly brace so that is looks like this:
if( stristr( $content, '<' . $tag . '>' ) ) {Save the file and you are all set.
This fix will be permanently applied to the next version (2.8.3)