Frank,

>  > Any ideas about how to ignore BOMs?
>
> BOMs? as in www.bom.com? sorry for being ignorant

Byte Order Mark, which is added by many editors to
identify the Unicode encoding. It is added at the
very beginning of the document, with the combination
EF BB BF meaning UTF-8 (ie, U+FEFF in UTF-8). I played
around with different approachs to get rid of them
(or to take them into account) in plain, but I have not
found a satisfactory solution. In LaTeX it's more or
less easy, provided the format is modified, since
they are placed before \documentclass.

Javier