""""""""Where are you seeing the funky characters, you mean inside of the file contents themselves?"""""""

Yes, I was just diffing the contents and noticed the title flag with what appeared to be possible illegal charaters, so was speculating. I also noticed that the good one had a "private to illustrator" flag, that the faulty one didnt, and saw you rerspond to him about the export option...

I also refered to the windows ADS that carried the block on the file and didnt know if that was affecting a mac, but ruled that out on windows alone....

So I was just poking around before you as a learning experience.