I seem to remember overflow: scroll working just fine on lechs root styles. And i'm pretty sure scroll bars only popped up when they were needed. I might be going insane though.
Well... the only way to break it without the scrollbar would be to insert a breaking character (such as a space) at intervals in the string, whenever the string runs on without one. (Google does this with the green text below their search results, if you try it in I.E.)
Splitting is not recommended if the text is copy/paste code or URLs. But clickable URL text could be split in this manner.
If you want to limit the width of images, they will have to have width coded in the CSS, which could get ugly. Or use a thumbnailer to show a thumbnailed version with a link to the large image.
if it's for a clickable url, I would recommend that the function which handles auto-linking possibly be patched (if it already isn't) to shorten the display url after 50+ characters.