Under certain conditions setting a font to bold, italics, or underlined typeface
and back again will cause the alphabetic text to return to the default version
of the selected font. However, punctuation will often retain the bold, italics,
or underlined property even after the alphabetic text reverts.

Steps to reproduction:

(1) Type a few short sentences. Make sure to enclose at least two words inside
parenthesis... use several different punctuation types as well.
(2) Now, go back though the sentences and put the cursor within a word diretly
abuts some sort of punctuation mark (but do not select it) and change its
typeface to bold, italic, or underline using the CTRL+B, CTRL+I, or the CTRL+U
hot-keys.
(3) Now hit the same hot-key again to return it to the default (normal) typeface.
(4) Note that the text returns to its default (normal) typeface but the
punctuation does not.
(5) Repeat this process for different punctuation types.

Further Observations:

If two words separated by a hyphen (-) or an em-dash (—) with no space between
them and one of the words has its typeface changed (as described above) and then
reverted, the word on the other end of the hyphen or em-dash will not be changed
back.

Affected Punctuation:

It seems like periods (.), commas (,), full colons (:) question marks (?),
hyphens (-), em-dashes (—), parenthesis (), and possibly other types of brackets
are affected by this bug as well.

Unaffected Punctuation:

In my tests, it seems that semicolons (;) seem to be totally unaffected by this
bug. Your mileage may vary. I have not exhaustively tested this bug against
every possible punctuation combination. 

Tested Platforms:

I have tested this on Ubuntu Linux 8.10 with OpenOffice.org 3 64-bit edition and
on Microsoft Windows 32-bit editions as well.