Hard Returns being Inserted

[Barb Harris]

Can anyone tell me what setting I have wrong that would cause a hard return to be (arbitrarily?) inserted into some rows of a .DAT file that I am editing in TEXTPAD. This in essence creates two records in the file when it should be only one record? The records outside of TEXTPAD are all fixed length 460 and stay that way if you don't open the file with TEXTPAD and they process correctly?! Once I've opened the file with TEXTPAD, my processing goes awry.

I have also seen what appears to be a tab arbitrarily inserted into some rows making them extend past the expected 460 causing the same (bad) results.

Any ideas?! I've investigated all the faq's and threads on word wrap but that doesn't seem to be the culprit.