[Tex/LaTex] Beamer not working at all!

beamercompilingerrorsinput-encodingspdftex

Suddenly I am getting the cryptic "Text line contains an invalid character" errors (100 of them) on all my beamer files. Even this MWE doesn't work right:

\documentclass{beamer} 

\begin{document} 

Sample document. 

\end{document}

I am using the latest TeXnicCenter (2.02 stable) and Miktex 2.9 – what has gone wrong?

My feeling is that something is screwed up with the encodings but I can't figure out what.

UPDATE: Texmaker doesn't work either, giving this error:
"A funny symbol that I can't read has just been input."

Best Answer

Having seen the .tex file, there is no problem with the code. The .log on the other hand reveals that the culprit is ifpdf.sty, after receiving ifpdf.sty by email we can conclude it is corrupt. In my emacs all the file contains is ^@.

I recommend a MikTeX reinstall, or even moving to TL (just because I generally prefer TL over MikTeX even on Windows).

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