Admin slowdown and missing paragraph breaks

Note: there’s an update at the bottom

This is a bizarre one. I’ll start at the beginning…

I started having some trouble with my WordPress installation over the last few days. The site and admin were running extremely slow. I started removing elements to try to find the culprit (tried removing my Webstat badge and an RSS feed, but it didn’t help). The site finally sped up when I removed the Cloudy widget (creates a content cloud), but admin is still running slowly. For instance, when I try to save a post, it just sits there. If I hit “back” I find that the post saved/edited, but admin never cycled around to tell me that.

Now, on top of all of this, NONE of the paragraph breaks on my site (the <p /> function) are working properly. Instead, they’re showing up like line breaks. Everything was working just fine a day or so ago. If I look in the WYSIWYG editor, and if you look at the code of the page, they’re there. Interestingly, when I load a post up in the non-rich editor (whatever you call it) I find that the actual code (<p/)> has vanished entirely!

I can’t pinpoint exactly when this started. I do know that the admin function slowdown started 1-2 nights ago. It may have coincided with the installation of the Cloudy widget, but I can’t be sure. Obviously I have no idea if it’s in any way connected with the missing/altered paragraph breaks.

Just to clarify: If I enter a post with this code…

<p>Testing this</p>
<p>To see if it works</p>

It should look like this:

Testing this

To see if it works

Instead, it just looks like this:

Testing this
To see if it works

Here’s a link to my blog: https://www.endgamepr.com/wordpress

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UPDATE: This might be a theme problem. I switched from the theme I’m using (WP-Andreas01 1.5) to the default themes and one that I downloaded just to try out, and the paragraph breaks are exactly where they belong!

Could a file have gotten corrupted? If so, how can I fix it?