Yeah, it's not a virus or somesuch... it's just "smart text." It's where certain editors like Word change quotation marks, ellipses, apostrophes and the like from plain text into their typographically equivalent single character.
-V
I understand that, I've seen that happen in some other software…but why all of a sudden? I'm typing the same characters I've been using for years - oh, let me put my three periods here and check it again, see what happens...