square brackets read as "A" with an Umlaut

i have a blog that i moved back to APlus from Hostgator and simply downloaded the content from HG and uploaded to APlus.

now all my square brackets (i think) are reading as an A with an Umlaut.

does anyone know why this is happening and what i can do about it. i have a /boatload/ of these all over a ton of posts and the idea of going through and manually editing them is going to be a real pain.

TIA