>> the code once more revealed what the problem was. The syntax errors were occurring in places where there were string constants that contain characters in the upper-ASCII range -- which are often used as "lead-in" characters for double-byte sequences. Essentially what was happening was whenever the character immediately preceding the closing quote was being intepreted as a "lead-in" for a double-byte character, the closing quote would get "eaten" -- thus resulting in the syntax error.
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> So you padded it with an extra character, or what was the solution?
We side-stepped the problem by using CHR() (rather than entering the string directly with ALT+nnn). For example, wherever we had "©" we simply used CHR(169) instead. And of course, we not only needed to change the PRGs, but also in SCXs, FRXs, DBCs, etc...