Recently there have been reports of the first letter of a line of text being lost in the database and letter modules.

I tracked down what appears to be the same problem and developed a work-around.

The problem appears to be with the \grabbufferdata command. Something has changed in the way it works, and it now swallows the first token of the buffer that it grabs. It may also show up with other commands, but this is the only one I have found in my projects.