It seems that PB Support has been chasing this issue for a while. For some reason Disabling Bind Variables causes the ODBC interface to replace control characters on the way to the database. PB thought it was a SA bug but didn't notify the community that they could be corrupting their data. it didn't really become more visible until people like me started using the new RichText Controls which have a different syntax with a \n in it.
It's been confirmed as a reproducible behavior at PB but I have also logged an incident with SA.
I have spent a day chasing this - but I know for the time being if I have to include any text stream in an update I need to switch to DisableBind=0 during the update. My biggest concern is that we do store a lot of text streams for document assembly and things might be corrupted if characters like \n or \\ are found in the text.
We have DisableBind=1 turned on for various reasons, so I may have to rethink this for the entire system.