If I understand you correctly, you enter the search characters for MEATL and it returns all instances of MEAT L (space) and MEATL (no space).
So if you press Enter when you see "Meat Loaf" selected on the screen, does it play all of the songs, both with and without the space? If so, that's the correct behavior, it's what you want, right?
As far as being able to find and fix those typos in the tags, Emplode 2.0 will make this brain-dead easy. It'll take you about eight seconds to find those files and fix them in Emplode.
If it were me, though, I still would go back and fix the bad tags on my hard disk, in case I ever needed to re-load the empeg. Remember that changes to the empeg's database don't get written back to the actual MP3 tags.
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Tony Fabris