And, again, it is just FerretBoy and one or two others that exhibit this behavior.

Hmmm. I think the smoking gun here is the sexed quotes (U+201C, U+201D) on the "manager" line. (Except they're in there at their CP1252 codepoints, not their Unicode codepoints). It looks like IE (or, more likely, the GDI itself) gets confused when asked to render those characters in the sans font, and fails over to the serif one. Round-tripping that text via Word is likely to have introduced sexed quotes where there were none before. In that particular post of FerretBoy's, "manager" and "my issue wasn't spot on" have sexed quotes, "resolved" and "a price for going over someone's" have unsexed quotes (U+0022, U+0027). So Doug, your font is shagged; FerretBoy, you're sending characters that only look right in CP1252; and Drakino, the BBS is advertising its pages as ISO-8859-1 but is illicitly serving octets in the range 0x80..0x9F. The Right Thing would be (a) serve BBS content in UTF-8, or (b) arrange for characters that are submitted in CP1252 to be echoed back as their HTML entities -- &ldquo, &rsquo etc.

Edit: And Bitt, you're scarcely better, with your U+0060 spacing grave accents.

Peter