confused by text cells.

I have a sheet of data explored from an ACT database. ACT currently has a (known) new bug in that it adds a blank newLine to all fields.
So I made a copy of the sheet with every cell having a "=clean(..)" of the corresponding original cell.
Then I copied all of that , and did a paste as values into a new blank sheet.

The result looks ok, but the number cells are all text.
I changed the format of them from text to numeric - no effect.
then I made a copied column with "=value(..)" of each cell, but that gives a "#value!" error (B4, B5).
I tried the "*1" trick, that gives a "#value!" error (C6,C7).

Oddly, only the first two cells (A2,A3) give the error "number stored as text" with a conversion option.

I haven't yet tried all the other conversion tools/tricks, but why are these simple conversions not working?