IPA bugs in Windows?

One of the features of the Tirelhat dictionary / word usage guide that I'm
slowly putting together is the pronunciation of each word in IPA. I thought
it would be cool to include the pronunciation on the English side as well.
But then I noticed a U+019E LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH LONG RIGHT LEG in one
of my pronunciations where I had put a syllabic N [n=]! It's odd that this
obsolete symbol would show up anywhere. It certainly doesn't make sense for
_English_ syllabic N as in "button" (American pronunciation), which is a
different thing entirely from the Japanese sound it was originally designed
for. The _really_ odd thing is that as far as Microsoft Word knew, it still
_was_ an "n" with a vertical line under it! And deleting the "n" makes the
vertical line show up normally.

Okay, I thought: I can live with syllabic "n" being displayed as this
obsolete character, since the internal representation is correct. But the
real evil of this bug came up when I tried to represent the Tirelhat
affricates. Since there's a distinct difference in length between
affricates and clusters in correctly pronounced Tirelhat ("c" should be
around 120 ms long, compared with 160 ms for a "ts" cluster that might come
up in a compound word), I thought it would be nice to use the U+0361
COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE (following the IPA recommendation). But
when a document containing the sequence 't' U+0361 's' is saved and
reloaded, ***the 't' is displayed as a lowercase u with grave accent and
the U+0361 vanishes!*** Again, deleting the 't' makes the tie bar show up.
And all of this is happening with the Thryomanes font, which is entirely a
normal TrueType font: it doesn't have any TrueType Open tables for glyph
substitution and positioning or any such thing! (It happens with other
fonts too, but most of them don't even have a tie bar in the character
set.)

Does anyone have a clue what might be going on, or how (if) it might be
possible to work around this bug? (Short of reassigning the tie bar to some
nonstandard character code or anything like that, if possible.) Now that I
can type in IPA, I'd like to be able to use it properly. I could go with
the old-style IPA ligatures as a last resort, but I hope I don't have to do
that. I don't know if the bug is Windows XP specific, but it happens even
without Keyman loaded, and even Character Map is affected by it! Worse,
Character Map switches to a different font when it happens (it looks like
Arial).

--
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