I was curious about 'why Live Writer replaces "--" with a dash' (and if there were any way I could get it to replace 'a couple OTHER keystrokes' with symbols like 'the cent,' etc.)

Well, I opened Tools > Options > Editing, and saw there the options to 'replace hyphens with dash,' 'replace straight quotes with smart quotes' and ... 'replace other special characters' ...

WHAT 'other special characters' WHERE?