updating post button not updating 90% of time

[restmin]

I am having a quirky thing happen that has been going on all day, but now it's getting worse. When I click publish, it won't publish. I can click draft. And then go into "quick post" and change it to publish to publish it. Now that I am going back through a few posts to fix graphics, when I click "publish" it drops down to the "custom field" area. the custom field is okay. and if I just happen to click it nice and smooth or something it will publish maybe the 10th time for no apparent reason.

The other quirk is the inability for it to take the hspace and vspace dimensions through the image pop up options. I can insert my images and then I go into the HTML and put them in.

I know I sound like I don't know what I'm doing but I have about 8 blogs with wordpress.com, I'm just new at all the self-hosted stuff, so these publish and image issues are new to me and I wondered if there were any known problems you'd run into with them yet with a plug in or something.

I've come up empty on Google and wordpress.org forums.