Reread the previous post -- the Regions are not being joined when you delete the top Region, you're just seeing sections of longer Regions that had been partially covered up. If you want to get rid of any Region just select it and delete it.
I don't know how you got those Regions to overlap if you weren't editing at some point with the Command key down, so if you don't have a musical reason to overlap Regions then I guess just don't use that shortcut when editing. If something else caused them to overlap, well, I don't know what that might have been -- Command-editing was the only way I could get it to happen.