I use a standard NA client, but I do occasionally switch locale to Japan, because some of the visual novels I have require non-unicode text to be in Japanese in order to run correctly. Before I made this post, I realized that could be it, and i switched it back to US, but that didn't help.
In any case, deleting the two symbols seems to have fixed it, XVM is now working properly, and the auto-log-on mod, which i didn't even realize wasn't working, is working again as well. Thanks a ton, Almace.