Further to issue 1 - I have identified the issue was caused by the wrong DocType header on the aspx page.
I had
<! DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
instead of:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Once I changed that over, the initial space did not appear after the first letter and changing it back again revealed this issue.
Thanks