Well, I went back after posting this and fooled it into sending. Everything happened like I described above, but after I went to the person's profile page and clicked I wanted to send them a PM, I had to hit the red "x" (their name briefly appears in the box then immediately jumps below with a red "x" next to it), then retype in the name and add a "nt" to the body of the post (What I had to say fit into the subject line alone), and it went.
But that's still not normal acting to me. I can work with it if that's the case, but just wanted to let those who may be working on this stuff know what I ran across.