problems decrypting ASCII-armored file

[Andrew Gallagher]

> 
> Here's the file's header as viewed with "less" (the starting non-printing character is suspicious):
> <U+FEFF>-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

That's a Unicode byte order mark. Strictly, it should only be used in UTF-16 documents but in the real world it's commonly used to mark any Unicode file. I'm assuming this is a UTF-8 file? If so, you should just be able to delete the character using vim or similar and try again.

Andrew.