Lemming and all,
I tried the macro text cleaner macro posted by Lemming (thanks!). Unfortunately it did not delete the hidden character(s).
So I concluded that the troublesome character(s) had to be some other character than the ones specifically filtered by text cleaner macro. The data in the Excel cell had been copied from a table of stock values (from Bigcharts.com), and thus could contain ??? in addition to the numeric values for open, high, low, close, volume for each stock symbol.
Thinking about the approach used in the text cleaner macro, I wrote the attached macro that cleans ALL ASCIII characters from 0-31 and 127-255 from the text string copied from the Excel cells. The filtered characters are not normally used for typical alphanumeric strings.
It worked! I ran a test and determined the unwanted embedded, non-printing, character to be between ascii 127 - 255. Anyway, happy ending. The Excel cell values, after being filtered by the attached macro, now paste into my target application program as numbers.
ASCII_TEXT_FILTER.MEX