[PhilJ]

You can remove all folders in /var and it will auto re-generate the cache.
But to me, sounds like one or more PHP files didn't upload/transfer correctly, or are corrupted.
Maybe there's a BOM issue, (byte order mark) on some. I can send you a file to check/fix.
You should always be uploading with UTF-8 encoding. Depends what method you used to do the transfer...