A Lightroom 3 import question

With my situation, I have m camera set to auto-rotate both on the LCD and when it imports. If I use Windows Photo Gallery to import, it orientates the images properly and when I then import them into LR3 all is good. My issue is when I directly import from my CF card to LR3. Images look okay in LR and CS3, but in Windows Photo Gallery or any non Adobe product, the verticals are displayed horizontally. It is almost as if LR knows which way the image goes but doesn't want to share that bit of information with any other programs.

Back to the question are we talking about jpegs or Raws (viewing using the Canon Codec)?

As far as I know Lightroom should not do any such thing to an image. When it Imports a file it just keeps the file info in its catalog until you export it. If you think otherwise, check the file modified property and ensure that nothing has been changed.

Lightroom (same as any other RAW processor software) will not change the original RAW file......

A lot of people think that what they see on the screen in LR is their image. It is not. It is a low resolution preview made using data read from the photo file and stored for display purposes alone. In fact there are two of them; one for the Library mode, stored in the .lrdata sub-folders, and another for Develop, stored in the ACR cache. It is these previews that LR rotates when the appropriate flag is present in the Exif.