I get a message “no search text entered” as an error message.

With regard to the italic formating, I added it by highlighting and control + I

then I am lost I am afraid. Although you ave not told me about any possible filters in place.

Steve… any ideas why this text would fail to post?

not really… posts here and on other sites I tried…

do you perhaps have an artificially small post max size?

and it redirects to front page???  we dont do that even on failed attempts…  so indicates something else at work…  any chance you are running mod_security?  its a crappy attempt at pattern matching and may be thinking there is some security risk in the content…  some whacked hosts still run it…