I had been using word to type my posts (due to the spell check). Anything that required text which might be read (and transformed) by Word, I typed in Notepad before I cut and pasted into MT. After a recent "rebuild site" all of my hyphans (-), quotations (""), etc. have been changed to question marks (?). Haven't changed anything and I've never had problems before. Unfortunately I'm unable to remove the ?'s without manually checking every entry. Any suggestions???

This isn't really a fix to your problem, but rather a work around. Try using a desktop blogging client to write your posts. They have spell check and other features built in and work with the XML-RPC function to publish directly to your blog.

For Windows: and w.bloggar
For Mac: ecto

Also, if you use IE you can get a great utility called ieSpell which allows you to spell check any text you put in a text box (like the MT entry field).

I set up my elderly father in a blog, and he writes in Word, then copies to w.bloggar to add tweaks, then uploads. While he doesn't get the ?? you mentioned, he does occassionally get an unrecognized character that plays havocs with saves, etc., and I have to go rescue him when he does that!

Point is, something in the process of using Word looks like it's causing some aberrant character, although I'm not totally sure since my Dad is creative when it comes to causing MT errors I've never seen, so it might be something else he's doing!

If you're using notepad as an intermediary, it should be stripping everything erroneous out.

I have seen on this forum posts from some folks where there are a lot of ? marks throughout in places that shouldn't be...and always thought it was a Mac-related thing.

Sorry this isn't a solution, just more anecdotal stuff that doesn't really help...