RSS Feed rendered incorrectly with WP_USE_THEMES false

Hi all,

I am running 2.3.2. I use WP_USE_THEMES set to false,
and then I render my HTML using my custom PHP files
which make calls to template tags.

My symptom is that RSS feeds (URLs to /blog/feed/)
render incorrectly. Upon examination, I saw an
RSS XML document followed by an HTML document.

I believe this is because for some reason in a
previous version, the “exit” statements in template-loader.php were changed to “return”.

As a result, what happens is that do_feed() gets
called, returns from template-loader.php and then
my custom PHP code gets called, which renders the
HTML. So the resulting feed document is XML followed
by HTML.

I hacked template-loader.php to change the 3 returns
to exits (only in the WP_USE_THEMES false/undefined
condition) and the feeds seem to be working.

I wonder about trackback and robot (I have yet to
find out what is_robot and do_robot do, so if anyone
has a concise explanation or a link, I’d appreciate
it.)

Anyway, I’d like to know if the return/exit substitution
is a bug or a feature and I appreciate guidance on how to
proceed in terms of helping the wordpress community with
this issue.

Thanks,
Vishizzy