Make sure that whatever application you are editing in isn’t save files as UTF-8. When files are encoded like this, they add 3 bytes at the top of the file which appear before the <?php
open tag at the top of the file. You don’t normally “see” these characters because they are instructions to the editing program about the type of encoding that it needs to use when saving the file.
If possible, change your editing tool to ANSI encoding before you save the file. Windows Notepad has this option on its Save As...
screen – Look for Encoding at the bottom of the window.
Hope this helps someone – it had me scratching my head for a while …