Go to any directory where you have write access (say, something besides root).
I'm going to assume that's c:\ABC, so modify ABC below to your own directory name. Go
dir c:\users > foo.txt

Now do this - immediate window 
    Workbooks.OpenText Filename:="C:\ABC\foo.txt", Origin:=437, StartRow:=1, _
        DataType:=xlFixedWidth, FieldInfo:=Array(Array(0, 1), Array(10, 1), Array(17, 1) _
        , Array(21, 1), Array(39, 1)), TrailingMinusNumbers:=False
A4 gets "Directory" (no trailing spaces)
B4 gets "of c:\" (no leading spaces)
My question is, what happened to the space between the word "Directory" and "of" ??
I presume that this is going to happen with the fixed width text to column command too.
I could understand it being eaten if my text-to-column processing was delimited, but this is fixed width.

AFAICT it doesn't lose meaningful characters; only spaces between words. Is this absurdity documented?

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P.S. I am having to log in to xlforum way too much. It's as though I time out after some number of minutes. I do always bang the Remember Me box. Windows 7 / current Firefox

When this happens I also get an immediate error message if I was simply hitting F5 to refresh my subscription list, even AFTER entering credentials:
"Invalid Redirect URL (http://www.excelforum.com/subscription.php?folderid=0)"