This from http://www.expression-web-designer-help.com/forum/printer_friendly_posts.asp?TID=532

Thanks Again!!

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Yes,
EW is adding a BOM to all the PHP pages, So if you are pulling PHP include files, try adding this to the head of each include file:

This tricks EW into NOT adding the BOM, but doesn’t affect the browser in any way. Since EW will see the content type (even though it is commented out), it will not add the BOM. Also remember to put a content type on your regular page, as well; such as:

As Jim says, you will also need to change the setting on your stylesheet.

Good luck to anyone else who noticed this problem!
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Excellent post. Keep it up!…

To remove it from your CSS file:

Open the file in EW - Right click in the file and choose Encoding

In Save the current file as: dropdown choose Unicode (UTF-*) (or an
encoding that you want)
Clear the checkbox “Include a byte-order mark (BOM) when saving as
Unicode - Click Save as… and overwrite the original file.

A line like this @charset “utf-8″; will be added and the BOM
removed.
Obviously you should back up and test this first
HTH
JIM

at this site:
http://www.expression-web-designer-help.com/forum/printer_friendly_posts.asp?TID=532

I ran into it before when working with PHP. If you double-click a PHP file in Expression web that has not been changed from the default (as mentioned above), you get these BOM characters. PHP doesn’t like them!

Out of curiosity I opened an HTML file using the DOS editor and the characters are there, too. I guess I’d better change my default encoder to strip out those characters. NOTE: I’m currently set at the default.

Randy

Any luck figuring it out? What you could do is open up a hex editor and look at the codes for the first few characters there. Match it against an ascii table and see if that means anything.