Strange parsing issue after switching from embeds to Low Variables snippets

My coworker and I are baffled by a recent issue that came up when we switched all of our embeds over to Low Variables. The weirdest part is that the issue is happening on his machine, not mine, and we have identical code and database...

So, we have a low variable we called 'low_snippet_left_sidebar' that's set for early parsing, and saved as a file. We're calling it from our template by using just {low_snippet_left_sidebar}.

{exp:navee:custom
    nav_title="main-nav"
    start_nav_from_parent="true"
    class="secondary-nav"
    only_display_children_of_selected="true"
    selected_class_on_parents="true"
    parent_selected_class="parent-selected"
    }
    <li class="{class}" data-count="{navee_count}"><a href="{link}" rel="{rel}" target="{target}" title="{title}"><span>{text}</span></a>{kids}</li>
{/exp:navee:custom}

And when that renders on the page, it spits out the nav just fine... except before each nav item, there's a stray d" } that shows up for some reason... And that just happens to be the end of that long navee tag with parameters on separate lines.

I tested out swapping the last two parameters in that tag, and what ended up happening was the stray characters became e" } instead. Weird.

So then we tried making that navee tag all on one line, without having each parameter on its own line, and the problem went away! What is happening here?

How come having line breaks in my tags works on my machine, but not on my co-workers? This issue doesn't arise if we just use EE's Snippets instead of Low Variables...

here is a pic of the nav that gets output, without the errors (we used EE snippet) http://paleosun.com/misc/mahec-secondary-nav-working.png

And here's a pic of the nav that gets output as a Low Variable http://paleosun.com/misc/mahec-secondary-nav-broken.png

Any ideas/hints/clues? I don't think this is a nav-ee related issue, as the same issue is happening wherever we have line-breaks between parameters in tags, in a low variable, and only on my coworkers computer...

Thanks!