I managed somehow to shrink me edit/post/reply menu to the point where it accepted no input.
The work around seems to be to engage the [toggle view] icon, stretch the screen to a usable size, then input, preview and post as normal.
The downside is that the default [view] is still an unusable single line that accepts no input or modification.
Logging off and turning off my computer did no good. I searched the help section without success. While this is far from an ideal solution I'll leave this which may aid someone down the line.
Terry