yeah, I think it has to do with how certain text editors handle the encoding. I changed the utf-8 to utf-16 and the xml parser seems to be getting over it's problem with the prolog...i have now moved on to the next set of tagging errors but at least they are within the xml body.
I found it here at the sun site...the last post is what I think is relevant to the phenomena...
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=567285&tstart=1 [ May 06, 2005: Message edited by: Tom Griffith ]