Help, there's garbage in my Outlook signature (or what the hell is this  in my sig)

Outlook will add garbage characters to your sig. It is the UTF-8 byte order marker.. for some reason Microsoft wants to add this for all signatures.

Anyway, to fix it, you need to manually modify your .sig files. They are located under C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures on Windows XP. On Vista they can be found under C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures.

Once there, you will see several files:

signature.htm
signature.rtf
signature.txt

I just needed to modify the .rtf and .txt files by deleting the "" in the first line to rectify the issue. I used notepad for the .txt file and Word for the .rtf file.