Stephan, thanks for pointing out the fact that I had the streams defined in the wrong place. Winston, I had to go back and relearn input and output streams and stream readers. The leading character did not disappear until I eliminated all of the Data input/output streams. Thanks for helping me clean up my code. I post the updated code and output below for your review and comments.
the code from the W7 PC side:
the code for the NXT robot side:
This is the output on the windows console:
Thanks again. --John