If your starting to code and edit webpages, that use php, you might want to to find yourself the proper text editor, many people choose notepad, or wordpad, both are supplied in any Windows OS, but this is the worst thing to do, especially when dealing with php.

Wordpad is basically the worst text editor program available, sure it may look all nice and fancy, but it also injects abunch of junk to your code when saved, notepad does this occasionally. This is because it saves the files with a signature or Byte Order Mark (BOM) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark ) at the beginning of UTF-8 text.
For more information, see the article Unexpected characters or blank lines ( http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-utf8-bom.en.php ) on the W3C site.

Older text editors or browsers will display the BOM as a blank line on-screen, others will display unexpected characters, such as . This may also occur in the latest browsers if a file that starts with a BOM is included into another file by PHP. Alot of browers and php based pages don't like them and will not work correctly if they are present, phpBB is one of the many php based scripts that don't like Bom Signatures.

To cure this issue use a editor that doesn't leave Bom Signatures(extra characters or spaces in a file) in other words don't use notepad to edit files. I use an editor called Notepad++ and it is free ( http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm ) But if you don't like that one, there are others that will work and are free.(Crimson editor is another one)