Wordpress line break issue (<br /> , <br> & <p>)

So your awesome new Wordpress blog isn't doing line breaks (returns/blank lines) like it should after paragraphs and you need answers fast.

A "line break" is simply a blank line between sentences or paragraphs (much like the space between this sentence and the one above it).

I had this problem for about a week and it drove me crazy, I was sure it was a Wordpress problem until I discovered it was actually an issue with my theme.

Here are the symptoms ... These tags will not cause line breaks (returns) as they should :

<br />
<br>
<p>
</p>

Look inside your Wordpress theme css file and see if you can find something like this :

p {
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
}

If you do try removing it (only after making a backup of the code) and see if that works.

I had two instance of that type of code which was controlling how my post looked. After I removed the above type of code everything worked like a charm.