the FCKEditor that ios used by HTMLEditor does not have a way to force <br /> tags instead of <br> tags, this is a limitation to the tool.
In the insert record behavior, you can use the replace function to replace any occurance of <br> to whith <br /> instead, the code would look like:
<?php echo((isset($_POST["country"]))?str_replace("<br>", "<br />", $_POST["country"]):"") ?>
Formatting can be toggled on or off. In other words if you set text to be bold, reelecting the bold format will remove it. For any format you wish to remove, you have to reselect that format to toggle it off.