Did some searching and � is unicode character U+FFFD. It's called the "replacement character", quote
used to replace an incoming character whose value is unknown or unrepresentable in Unicode
compare the use of U+001A as a control character to indicate the substitute function
My guess is the launcher is displaying that character in error. It's probably expecting a character but doesn't get it, but still displays the �, and so it appears everywhere. Or maybe it's displaying text from html and the display code prints out the � characters when it shouldn't.
tl;dr it's a bug.