Yes, it's a
Microsoftism, and causes many problems.
Unfortunately, they seem
pretty keen about it (I guess they just don't
care about the effect
on non-MS software), and there's MS software out
there (VSxxx
Japanese edition, at least) that _forces_ you to use a
BOM if you
want to use UTF-8. As you can imagine, this makes writing
portable
source code a bit miserable...
-miles
