She call me Mr BomBastic say me fantastic

The simple work around i found was to use an ftp client like the free filezilla from http://filezilla-project.org/ to download any files that may have been saved in notepad when messing around with either the theme or the config file. Then use notepad++ another free app from http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ to open the files and convert to utf-8 without BOM. This takes a little time though, but you should be able to drag a group of files or a folder onto notepad++ to open them all and then just go a tab at a time and go to encoding ->convert to utf-8 without BOM, then save it and move on. when finished, right click a tab and select “close all but me” to get rid of the 20 odd tabs you might have if you dragged the entire theme folder into notepad++. next step is to re upload the files to you server with filezilla. And that should be done and now working again, plus with the added bonus of 1 less warning on the validator page.

There is also a setting in the settings->preferences ->New Document/Default DIrectory tab that sets the default encoding type, and can be applied to opened ANSI files. Though it does not recognise this as a change enough to save straight away, so either typing something in and deleting it would be necessary to save as the new encoding type. As of yet i have not found a way to batch encode, even with macros. Sorry

As a last note. I should point out that notepad++ is an amazing text editor, especially for developers on a shoe string budget, or who find dreamweaver just to clunky when all that’s needed is a little tweak here and there to a file. It has support for recognising and colour highlighting all sorts of programming/scripting languages, run macros, and even use a spell checker for regular text documents (need to download dictionary first though). All this and more in a light weight application that doesn’t necessarily need to be installed, just unzip the file and start using, or even point files to the notepad++.exe application file as the default app for a file type. The zip file actually gives 2 directories for different version of the app, unicode and ansi. Ansi isn’t in the install version as this will eventually be dropped, so unicode is the version to go for.