Frank, Lars Take care! I have not followed all the details of your debate but I get the impression that you may be wrong about how \vspace interacts with \addvspace. This is best described as `no interaction', since \vspace and relatives all `end with' \vskip\z@skip . The purpose of this is that, in LaTeX, _only_ those spaces added by \addvspace should interact (and with \addpenalty); all other spaces are irrelevant. Of course this does not work in general because TeX skips get added by all sorts of internal processes; on the whole, the LaTeX code tries to pretend those do not exist. chris