Currently & nbsp (and probably other special characters) are supported only partly in gallery and image titles. For example, this non-break space character works great on the gallery thumbnail page, but if the image is shown, html is not being interpreted correctly and all the control characters appear visible.
For example: Jan. 12 2004 instead of "Jan. 12 2004".
Without this non-break-space formatting, titles of images or galleries might be sometimes broken strangely. For example, "12 2004" looks silly alone in one line.
Even here in the mesage text the dealing with & nbsp is inconsistent: It appears in the title verbatim, it appears in the text if written together with other characters, but it will be interpreted as an invisible blank if it stands alone in the text. This is why I type & and nbsp separate. The box "disable html in this post" is active, though...
detail, details...
Thomas