Cell set to wrap text and blank line -- fix?

I often find that with a cell set to "wrap text" the cell opens up an
additional line before a charater of inserted text is actually placed
on (wrapped to) the new line. With a certain length of text in the
cell, a blank line appears at the bottom of the cell. (If the cell is
set to vertically align its contentes to "top".)

Short of manually setting the cell height to an explicit fixed value,
is there any way of preventing this behavior? Such that the cell is
always "filled," i.e., no blank line.

I'm using WinXP, SP-2 and Excel 2003, but it has been a problem with
Win2k SP-4 and Excel 2000 as well. I suspect it's a problem with all
versions of Excel.

Is this "too hard" for Microsoft to fix?

Thanks,

Fred Holmes