why am I seeing the spaces?

[SMcNeill]

We're digging into it.  At the moment, it appears that TAB() doesn't honor _KEEPBACKGROUND at all.  At first glance, this looks like a simple issue to patch quickly and without any major headache. 

Ha I just tested tab() do you mean comma?

Comma *is* tab().
TAB is func_tab().

Two different beasts in the c-side of things.  It's the tab() in libqb.cpp that's glitching, not func_tab().