Encoding is UTF-8, though actually it's mostly ASCII, as WinSCP URL-encodes most (if not all) non-ASCII characters. Can you attach the file here (as private attachment)?

it looks like my default ini viewer (notepad) is misreading the character encoding of the file. Similarly TYPEing it from a DOS prompt returns a file full of ?s and no other characters.

Wordpad can handle it.

Looking at an old WinSCP.ini, notepad, TYPE and wordpad can all display it.

File Encoding Checker (<invalid hyperlink removed by admin>) senses a desktop.ini in the same directory as UTF-16LE, but cannot determine encoding for either WinSCP ini.

In any case, what is the char-set encoding for exported files?

I just upgraded to WinSCP 5.7.7 (previous version likely 5.7.2 based on Downloads directory on this computer). When exporting configuration from the Tools button on the Login screen, the file appears to be encoded rather than in plaintext. This computer is strictly used in US-EN mode, but to my untrained eye the majority of the characters look Chinese (or may be another East Asian language).

Assuming this board accepts all unicode characters, the first few characters are 䍛湯楦畧慲
There appear to be very few line breaks (maybe 7 in total) in the file.

Is there a way to export in plain/asciitext? My exports from 5.7.2 appear in plaintext, but I'm not sure that I performed the exports identically.