What appears to be happening with the second string is this:

You match HIT. Then you go looking matching [^<]*?. The *? first tries to match the minimal number of characters, so it gets 0. And, the negative look-ahead does not try to do backtracking to make that *? match more so it can make the negative look-ahead match. (update: because, if it did that, then the look-ahead would be doing more then just looking ahead in the string.) Thus, it doesn't find a match and the negative lookahead succeeds, so the positive lookahead succeeds.