I've been observing a very annoying behavior with auto fill; it persist in the latest org from git, as well as the version shipped with Emacs 24.3 for OS X.
Consider starting a clean Emacs session with emacs -Q. Start a new file,
foo.org. Do M-x org-mode and M-x auto-fill-mode. Now enter the following 3 lines:
---
---
---
(yes, that's a bunch of dashes). Now try putting a long line in between the second and third set of dashes, and wait for auto-fill to wrap the line. Here is what I observe:
---
---
This is a long line designed to exhibit a bug in auto-fill. It's
---almost as if auto-fill thinks the dashes are a comment symbol.
---
Notice how after wrapping the line acquired a leading "---"! Why does this happen, and how can it be turned off?
--Leo