Is there an answer for this?

I am working with ADT 3.3 / Acad 2002. I have a drawing with multiple
xrefs. It is set up to be my fire rating and egress plan. On all the
master floor plans there are room tags with leaders pointing to the
appropriate room. The leader style is dot. The room tag layer was frozen or
turned off in the composite drawing. What I found was when I would plot the
dot symbol was appearing on some of the plans in the composite drawing. It
was just the dot, not the leader line nor the room tag.

I tried auditing and recovering the master plans and composite plan. This
didn't work the symbol would show up on the plotted file, even though it was
not visible in model space nor paperspace. As I mentioned above some of the
layers were frozen and others were turned off. I noticed the drawings
(xrefs) with the room tag layer turned off were the ones that the symbol
was appearing on. I changed the layer to be frozen and the problem
disappeared.

My question is can anyone explain what may have happened? I have worked
with Acad for 12+ years and never seen this.

 

Is dot a block? Was it created on a layer other than 0?
I've had trouble with blocks like this before. Create a block on layer 1, insert it on layer 2, turn off layer 2 and the block is still visible. If you click on the block and try to turn it off, AutoCAD will tell you that it's on layer 2 and that layer 2 is off, but the block is still there.

 

In your case, the block IS on layer 2, but what's in the block is on layer
1. Thus the difference between on/off and freeze/thaw......

insert it on layer 2, turn off layer 2 and the block is still visible. If
you click on the block and try to turn it off, AutoCAD will tell you that
it's on layer 2 and that layer 2 is off, but the block is still there.

 

The block is an autocad block - it is the DOT leader in the dim command.
From my experience, autocad blocks are created on layer "0"