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The title page is a bit of a special case. \\ really is a command to break into the next line and it is great in tabular-environments and lists. I don't want to go into detail right now, but titlepages are often lists as well.
Or in other words, a titlepage is something hand crafted, takes quite a ...

@Johannes_B: I'm not that aware, I think.
It is anyway empty space one wants to put into the title page isn't it? But you mean one should avoid to use \\ and instead write \newline?
I thought anyway one has to look at the result and tweak around with the title page ...

I wonder that you are happy with LyX.
When I began my thesis, I didn't want to learn LaTeX and tried it with LyX. But then I had to face the problem that I didn't know what I was actually doing. (Like you with the title page).
My problems with my figures were much bigger (they were to big and the ...

Hello! :)
I also did my PhD thesis in LaTeX, so welcome!)

How did you create the title page?
using

in the preamble
\title{...}
\author{...}
\date{...}

and then in the document:
\maketitle
?

If you want to manually create a title page, then you have to omit the \maktitle command in the LyX ...