Copy & paste error on certificate serial number or thumbprint

It is often useful to copy a certificate serial number or thumbprint to the clipboard. Both information, especially the thumbprint, can be used to securely identify a certificate, e.g. for certificate based authentication or accepting only request from a specific agent.

You can easily mark the the serial number or thumbprint with the mouse and a left click and than a Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard. So the strange thing is on the left before the hex numbers. If you paste it into notepad you will not see that extra character. On command line or pspad there is a question mark, e.g.

?‎14 c4 ff ce 00 01 00 00 00 14

In FIM2010 policy modules or in your application you have just to delete the first one or two numbers of your serial and type it again.

Seen on Windows XP, 2003 and Windows 2008 R2