Bob,

It is the "ViewState" if you are talking about the block of alphabetic characters.

You will see it in other ASP.NET sites:

"In ASP.NET pages, the view state represents the state of the page when it was last processed on the server. It's used to build a call context and retain values across two successive requests for the same page. By default, the state is persisted on the client using a hidden field added to the page and is restored on the server before the page request is processed. The view state travels back and forth with the page itself, but does not represent or contain any information that's relevant to client-side page display."