WordPress – help!

This blog is now about 2 months old and I've made 70 posts. I have done all my editing with WordPress, the software that publishes this blog. Some things work well, others are driving me wild (and actually stopping me blogging). Any suggestions would be welcome (except to stop blogging…)
In its native form WordPress does not catch Spam. I therefore scrolled through 30 spams/day are manually removed them. I was then pointed to free WordPress plugins, including Akismet. This provides a spam checker and – after registering – I installed the plugin. It has caught all the spams since then – thank you Akismet.
Wordpress does not have a spellchecker – you may have noticed! So I downloaded Firefox 2.0 which says it does. There is check box "Tools | Options | Check my spelling as I type". Exactly what I want. I checked it. It doesn't work. At least it doesn't perform the operation " Check my spelling as I type and inform me of the result". HELP!
Wordpress has an HTML editor (button called HTML). it brings up a window with the HTML source. I can edit this and "Update" which transmit my HTML changes to the edit window. I think it does. It also submits a lot of chenges I didn't request which completely screw up everything. It's worse than that – the normally edit window displays formatting an indents. It is WYSICUTOWIP. What you see is completely unrelated to what is published. HELP!
I recently suggested that it was a good idea to put InChIs is "alt" attributes for images. It is. The only way you can do this is using the HTML editor.  And guess what? It is then creative with the rest of your text. It tool me 20 mins to publish 4 chemical structures with alt tags. You might say – create your article elsewhere and simply drop it into the editor. I tried. WordPress usually garbles it. The problem today (where my italics screwed up all the posts in Planet Blue Obelisk) is because the editor had inserted an empty em tag (I won't try to reproduce it with angle brackets in case I screw this post). For non-HTML experts, an empty em creates a zero-length piece of text with no characters and makes the non-existent characters italic. If this were a null-op that would be just about OK, but it isn't. It is interpreted as "turn all subsequent characters italic, even those in other people's blogs where this post is inserted". Fun, but not widely appreciated. HELP
So how do I write CML and XML in my CML Blog? I can't at present, so the CML Blog is stalled. I have installed a "code" plugin for WordPress but we are not sure whether it does anything. HELP
Please don't think I'm ungrateful to WordPress – I'm not. And I'm not whingeing. It's freely available and I thank the creators. I write Open software and I know how difficult it is and how you often get dispiriting messages. (I once got a (gratuitous) message from someone in a chemical software company "CML is the most mangled format I have ever come across". Considering their own format is binary and abstruse in the extreme I return the compliment. They had failed to recognise the different between a proprietray format and a modern markup language architecture. But I'll rant on chemical software companies another day).
So in essence blogs with text are OK. Quoting, indents, so – so. Images can be a pain. Code is a nightmare. The management apparatus is good.