You nailed it. Chrome and Safari both lose the x via cut and paste or direct entry. Firefox was hit and miss some were fine and others stripped, so clearly it is an encoding issue between my source, the browser and WordPress. Should have thought of that one.
Solution that is working 100% now (knock wood) is FireFox and cutting and pasting my source information through Sublime Text. Works great and so much better than hopping from image to image!
Thanks.
