Tony, you don’t say how you read/ write your strings to the project file. ReadLn/WriteLn, TIniFile, TStringList.LoadFromFile/SaveToFile, etc?
I had an issue reading/writing European language characters to text files at one stage. The solution for me using TStringList was to force the encoding to utf8 and always write the BOM in text files.
Google something like “delphi stringlist utf8 encoding bom” to read more.
Cheers Richard