teaser problem

What I found was:
1. When no input filtering is enabled: it seems that the other fields are trimmed until they see a full stop or at the last letter if no full stop has appeared yet.
2. When input filtering is enabled for this text field then it will cut off right after the first html tag that it finds or after the last letter if no html tag has appeared yet.

I got this problem with a content type where I have a text cck field set as my teaser text. So in displays for this field it is set to "teaser" in a view using views2.

On admin/content/node-settings I can declare the length of trimmed posts which was set to 200 characters. "The maximum number of characters used in the trimmed version of a post." If I change that value there, it changes the teaser length throughout the site and also my problematic content type. So that's all fine but for this content type my teaser isn't showing 200 characters, it's only showing 22 characters. I must say that I have the input format set to filtered html. Now that first line apparently is the first paragraph. If I delete that line and I allow the paragraph to be longer my teaser will show only 118 characters (176 with the P tags and a link included). Still not touched the boundary of 200 characters.

What I found was:
1. When no input filtering is enabled: it seems that the other fields are trimmed until they see a full stop or at the last letter if no full stop has appeared yet.
2. When input filtering is enabled for this text field then it will cut off right after the first html tag that it finds or after the last letter if no html tag has appeared yet.

So what am I not doing that I should be doing here?
Is this a bug within the system or is it just the normal behavior and is my assumption/expectation wrong?