no matter how many carriage returns I put between the normal text and
the headline3 they don't appear.

This is how it is supposed to work.

Even weirder if you put any text on the carriage return lines between them they get added to the last line of text.

I don't understand, please give an example.

What I Mean is that the text above

title2

another paragraph worth of text blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah

then some preformatted text

some more text between
here's the problem

Is setup like this

h2. title2

another paragraph worth of text blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah

<pre>
then some preformatted text
</pre>

some more text between

h3. here's the problem

no matter how many spaces I put between the text and the headline 3 no space is created in the document and if I do this

h2. title2

another paragraph worth of text blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah

<pre>
then some preformatted text
</pre>

some more text between

added extra text

h3. here's the problem

It comes out like it appears in the original issue except "added extra text" is added on to the end of "some more text between" line like this "some more text betweenadded extra text" and again no matter how many spaces are between these lines of text no spaces are present in the wiki page. Also if you add more lines of text they all get added onto the line before the headline3. does this clarify it a bit better?