Garbled prefixes unexpectedly appearing in headlines

[Niels]

We use MadCap Flare 2017 r3 and have observed a strange encoding issue that we cannot explain, which disrupts some of our headlines in the .htm sources managed by Flare:

Unexpected garbled characters or strings appeared as prefixes in some headlines all of a sudden. This only happened in sources committed by one of our authors who is working in a Russian environment. It happened in multiple different commits and it has affected multiple topics in our project. (So far we only have one project with multiple PRINT and WORD destinations/targets.)

Some of these characters seem to be Russian Unicode characters but also other ASCII strings were observed:

<h1>торList of Service Names<a name="_Ref419993229"></a></h1>
<h2>тImaSPC</h2>
<h2><a name="_Ref480988408"></a>тCreate ImageMaster Database with IMA9 Model</h2>
<h1>итConfiguration Requirements</h1>
<h3>e20Unique Users</h3>
<h3>182Last Error Occurred</h3>

The author is not aware of having done anything peculiar. We are just working with Flare and do not use any other tools to edit the sources. The environment is bound to an SVN repository but we do not suspect that this is in any way related. Rather, we assume it could be caused by some basic OS setting or encoding issue related to code page settings, however, we have no clue what is going on.

As I can see, there is a Flare mechanism which pulls headlines from topics to reflect them in the TOC entries. But even here I would expect that this is a pure READ ONLY process.

Has anyone seen this phenomenon, or can anyone guess if this looks like a Flare issue or is rather caused by any kind of user interaction, which we are not aware of?

[Niels]

...two years later the probable cause was detected: typing while Flare is starting up with option "Auto-Reload Documents"