Testing, testing, one, two, three?
Edit: Some weirdness with closing tags, hover over the links in Chrome to see.
Oh. Doh. Ignore my original comment. Yeah I see that. The link is broken into two links because it has to style each section separately with spans: Easiest fix would be to turn off text-decoration: underline for a:hover. Or figure out a way to place the a tags outside the initial span so it styles the entire <a&62;<span&62; <span&62;</span&62;<span&62;</span&62; </span&62;</a&62; rather than each individual child span.
Should be fixed now. Test: <a><span><span></span><span></span></span></span></a>
Looks fine here but was still broken the same as before the email notoficatipn. I don't think that matters though. Just FYI
forwardslash - i broke it! what I typed to create error: 
Oh geez, I think I know what's wrong here. We're a little too aggressive in escaping characters it seems. Also we didn't take into account the escaped characters have #'s in them so it things that there are tag links.
Well at least you know what the problem is. :)