Honestly, I'm surprised that QB64 tosses those errors for us. We should kick out of the reading/processing those lines completely, if the $IF block is invalid. Since I haven't ran across this glitch in the past, I've never had to sort out where the syntax check for invalid characters pops up in the processing order of things. I'd imagine the fix to this is probably just as simple as cutting/pasting the $IF process before the syntax checking process. I'll dig into it later, when I get a little free time, if nobody else hunts down what needs to change operation order for us first.;)