Since I've had my mac, I keep seeing this weird symbol. Till today, it had been only in the place of bullet points in OpenOffice.org. The first pictures shows this in a .doc file created on a Windows system.

I thought nothing of it - just an annoyance. It appears no matter what the font. Real bullets appear if I delete the text and insert a bulletted list using the toolbar.

Then, today I noticed in in iTunes - which seemed strange.

Image 3 is a zoom of the character. It says on it: Private Use E000 F8FF.

What is it (unicode related?), and how do I get the bullets working properly?

Edit: The plot thickens... If I boot in Safe Mode, the symbols look like little snap boards like you'd have at the beginning of filming a scene in a film...