If I had to guess, the file you are reading is not regular (ANSI) text. Smells like binary or Unicode...
Open it in Notepad - can you read it? If so, click File / Save As. Note the data format at the bottom of the Save As dialog box - is it Ansi? If not, it won't be a regular text file and while ReadLine will read the data, it won't likely be what you need without conversion.
Glenn
_________________________
Actually I
am a Rocket Scientist!
