weird character on end of folder name in Finder

I'm seeing multiple folders with this character at the end on my nfs mounted external volume.

 which is ASCII  (ampersand-pound-61480-semicolon)

When I try to delete the character, the folder becomes a doc, and I can't see the contents until I remount the volume. This happens in nfs only, when I navigate to same folder via SMB the character is not there. I seem to recall 7-8yrs ago I had same problem, I think it was something like a macro from Microsoft Office... how do I delete thses and also prevent them from creeping back in?