Sorry for this late answer, but yes, there are other options.
I got the same problem these days with one of my WP-Blogs.
Imo the source of the “bug” are the wp-autoformat functions. I disable those via a plugin, and no <br> is inserted any more.
(in my case, WP inserted a <br> between a <img> and <h3>)
Check out WP-unformated or disableautop [ZIP] (i’m using the latter, got it as direct download link from a german site, so sorry for direct linking).
Hope this will help …
Regards
