Thank you ... you helped me to find the answer.
I discovered that my META was saying this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
When it should say this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ut f-8" />
There are a few other options, but this one works. The validator does indicate that UTF-8 is not fully...

I am looking for an answer to what might either be a very common problem or something specific to Mozilla Firefox users.
Let me explain...

A few days ago I noticed an interesting anomoly: Preceding everything on the page is the three characters as indicated in this w3 forum thread:
-- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2004Dec/0044

They only occur when I open the page with Mozilla Firefox...