>Use Word, to create HTML pages? This inserts a large amount of garbage codes, in my experience. I would recommend FrontPage Express (free, included with IE, but not installed by default), which is relatively clean.

I think so and in the begginng I used HTML editor or I cleaned HTML documents done with word, but one time I compiled two files - one produced from HTML Editor and the same corrected in Word. The size difference was very small.
I don't know how MS compress them in HTML workshop