sort acting like sort -d

[EdelSys Consulting]

Greetings.

I am using Sort (GNU textutils) 2.0,
that came with my Linux Mandrake distro,
and it is ignoring all nonalphanumeric characters
when I try to sort a file with it.  It's as
if I am doing a sort -d, except that I am NOT
specifying the -d, and I also have verified
that the sort command is not being aliased by
bash to add the -d.

Why is this happening?

Thanks,
Anthony Nemmer