Solved
Not sure if I have found the solution or not...still gathering user feedback.
However, I have noticed that since changing my preferences there have been no reports of the 'question mark' symbol appearing at the top of our DITA content.
What I tried is this...
I went into my AE preferences and under the "save" category there are two fields that should be checked. They are "convert character entities on save" and the other is under write non-ASCII Characters as "numeric character references".
I will update whether or not this has truly resolved the issue after a few more days of testing.
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