okay, solved, and boy was i lucky
i was so stressed about how these phantom characters got there that i began searching google for anything, and i mean anything, hell , im surprised i didnt search for new york,
beat this, the search phrase that i used to find my answer was:
php outputting "three characters"
and to me thats amazing, as i never really thought it would work, i was just giving up,
as for the answer:
dont ever use microsoft products again
apparently the new Expression Web (apparently used to be frontpage) cant seem to edit simple .php files without messing something up, it outputs the string i listed above, somewhere thats not visible (you can see it in hex editing), so by copying and pasting the contents to a simple notepad doc and saving, all is good. and the reason i was seeing it on random parts of the page, is because each part was where a php file was included that i had edited in expression web.
gah, i feel dumb,